In a year in which creating felt hard, I feel proud and a little bit still-in-love with this flash essay I wrote in May 2021. In the old days (circa last year), I may have submitted it to literary journals in the hopes of being “selected for publication” (aka validation I am a writer worth reading), but this year I experimented with validating my own self by publishing poems and essays when I thought they were ready and worth reading. I did this by publishing quietly on Medium with a little bit of self-promotion on social media. It was a worthwhile experiment that I recommend anyone in the literary community who has ever felt stuck on “being published” try.
I love almost everything I wrote this year during the time of the experiment, with this being my favorite:
