Word Raccoon and I are both under the weather after our writing retreat, tucked under blankets and passing cough drops back and forth like secrets. Still, we’re popping in with some good news worth sharing, even in a cold pill fog.

While we were away, two journals arrived in the mail with my poems inside them:

The Carolina Piedmont Writers Guild, Volume 13, 2026, included my poem Knocking Stars Out of the Known Universe

The Tulane Review (Fall 2025 issue), published by Tulane University, featured my poem Beatitude of the Quietly Scorned, a piece of social commentary

I’m deeply grateful to both of these journals for making room for my work in their pages.

And there’s more. My poetry collection Look, I Built a Cathedral was longlisted for the 2025 C&R Press Awards. It didn’t win, but the editors called it “eminently publishable.” I’ve decided to carry that phrase in my pocket like a talisman.

Here’s the official list, if you’re curious.

Honestly, that kind of note is the literary equivalent of a shot of NyQuil when you’re feeling wilted. (Though for the record, I haven’t taken NyQuil since it made me sick as a child. Disgusting, vile liquid.)

As for WR, she did write a tiny poem today while watching You’ve Got Mail. That movie is her preferred medicine whenever a cold takes over. She wanted to keep writing poems inspired by it. I said no. We are not going to create a chapbook about You’ve Got Mail. (But we could. We absolutely could. And no, I’m not watching it on repeat just because I rented it. I also own a physical copy. But that’s beside the point and involves hooking up tech we do not have the energy for just now.)

For now, it’s back to reading. Unless WR really, really wants to write poetry while the movie continues playing. I wouldn’t be mad about it.

WR would normally have something clever to add here, but if you read her tiny sick-day poem earlier, you know she’s operating at half power. Even so, she did lift her head during the part where the one woman in publishing name-drops Heidegger and Foucault. Don’t tell her, but she doesn’t know enough about either of them to write poems just yet.

That doesn’t mean she won’t learn. I wouldn’t put anything past her.

Anyway, I might try opening the novel before it forgets who I am again. While WR naps.