A Year of Sending the Work Out

About a year ago, I decided to begin submitting my writing to literary journals and magazines with real intention.

I had published before, but sporadically. I would finish something, admire it for a while, perhaps send it to one or two places, and then allow the demands of work and life to reclaim my attention. Last summer, I began treating publication as part of the writing practice itself. I would write, revise, research publications, submit, absorb the rejection, and send the piece somewhere else.

The results have surprised me. Over the past year, I have produced roughly one piece a week that I felt was ready to submit. Including the stories I already had in my back pocket from years past, more than fifty pieces have now been accepted, with several still awaiting publication.

The numbers are gratifying, but the more important change has been in the work. Writing this steadily has allowed me to experiment across fiction, poetry, personal essays, cultural criticism, and public argument. Submitting regularly has also made rejection less dramatic. It still disappoints me, but it no longer stops me. A rejection is usually followed by another submission, another revision, or another blank page.

I am grateful to every editor who has spent time with my work, including the many who ultimately declined it. Literary magazines run largely on devotion. Their editors read enormous quantities of work, often for little or no compensation, because they believe stories, essays, and poems deserve places to live.

Of the pieces that found homes during this first year, here are ten I am particularly proud of.

Fiction

1. “The Final Trolley”, Bending Genres

A Philadelphia trolley stops where no stop exists and begins collecting people from the narrator’s past: a fifth-grade teacher, an old friend, a lost dog, his mother, and eventually a younger version of himself. The story moves through memory, grief, and the uneasy question of whether we can leave our earlier selves behind without abandoning them.

Bending Genres was the right home for a story that begins in an ordinary city and quietly slips outside the rules of time. I admire publications willing to make room for strangeness without requiring a story to surrender its emotional clarity.

2. “Still on the Bus”, BULL

In this story, a quiet boy is accidentally left overnight on a school bus. What begins as a frightening childhood event gradually becomes a joke among his classmates. Years later, the adult narrator realizes that the joke has followed him, carrying his shame over having participated in it and his own inability to move forward.

BULL publishes work about the silences, contradictions, and wounds surrounding masculinity. Its editors also have a wonderfully unpolished affection for sentences that feel alive rather than respectable. A story about boys learning to disguise fear and guilt through cruelty belonged there.

3. “Detention Seeds”, Your Impossible Voice

A group of students assigned to pull weeds during detention secretly plants flowers in the cracks of the schoolyard. The adults respond with warning signs, rules, and weed-whackers, but the children discover that the roots remain. By the end, they are carrying more seeds in their pockets.

The story is about institutional control, childhood conspiracy, and the stubbornness of living things. Your Impossible Voice describes its taste as “voice-driven, off-center, and innovative,” publishing work that can be both “brash and velvety.” I cannot think of a better description of what I wanted this small rebellion to become.

4. “Slack”, SmokeLong Quarterly

Written as a set of instructions, “Slack” follows an adult helping a boy repair a bicycle chain. The practical lesson slowly becomes something larger: an examination of fathers, grace, damage, and the amount of looseness a thing sometimes needs before it can return to its proper place.

I had read and admired SmokeLong Quarterly long before I began submitting seriously. Since 2003, it has helped build a serious literary community around flash fiction and has published writers at every stage of their careers. Seeing “Slack” there made me feel that I had entered a conversation I had previously watched from outside.

5. “Hydrant Fish”, Flash Frog

During a hot afternoon on a city block, a girl who is new to the neighborhood finds a goldfish tumbling through water released from a fire hydrant. The children around her gather a jar, crackers, coins, and whatever else they think might keep it alive. By saving the fish together, they also make a place for the girl among them.

Flash Frog publishes stories under one thousand words, pairs each piece with original artwork, and promises fiction that is “small, brightly colored, and deadly to the touch.” The magazine later nominated “Hydrant Fish” for Best Small Fictions, which made this acceptance especially meaningful.

Poetry

6. “Borrowed Light”, Stone Poetry Quarterly

“Borrowed Light” begins during a power outage. As the machinery of ordinary life shuts down, the speaker considers how much depends upon electricity: insulin kept cold, hospital equipment, water pumps, traffic lights, elevators, and the small lights that allow people to climb stairs safely.

The poem is also interested in what happens among neighbors when those systems fail. People share batteries, bread, ice, and news. The returning electricity feels less like a triumph than a reprieve that should be spent more wisely. Stone Poetry Quarterly, which publishes poetry ranging from the visceral to the cerebral, gave the poem a fitting home.

Nonfiction

7. “Growing Heavy for the Vintage”, Commonweal

This essay draws on the years I lived in California’s Salinas Valley, where the labor of migrant farmworkers was visible everywhere and fully woven into the local economy. I wanted to write about the contradiction of depending on that labor while withholding recognition, security, and due process from many of the people performing it.

The essay approaches immigration through Catholic social teaching, especially the dignity of work, solidarity, and the obligation to welcome the stranger. Commonweal has spent more than a century bringing Catholic thought into conversation with politics, culture, justice, and the common good. Publishing there had been a personal ambition, and this remains one of the acceptances that has meant the most to me.

8. “Lake Effect”, Well-Schooled

“Lake Effect” tells the story of taking a group of Cornerstone students from Southwest Philadelphia to a small lake community in the Poconos. Many had never been in a canoe, traveled deeply into the woods, or experienced the rituals of a summer lake weekend.

The essay is partly about the students’ delight, but it is also about the generosity of the community that welcomed them with boats, fishing rods, meals, ice cream, and quiet encouragement. Well-Schooled publishes first-person accounts of teaching, learning, and leading. I appreciate its belief that the daily life of schools contains stories worth telling carefully.

9. “The Vestigial Front Porch”, Front Porch Republic

This essay begins on a summer evening in Southwest Philadelphia, with neighbors sitting on stoops, children riding scooters, music coming through open windows, and the knowledge that violence may have occurred only a few doors away.

I argue that the front porch is more than an architectural feature. It is a piece of civic infrastructure, a place where private and public life meet and where communities practice attention, accountability, mourning, celebration, and mutual care. Front Porch Republic has built its identity around place, local culture, human scale, and the institutions that allow communities to endure. I was proud to place Southwest Philadelphia within that conversation.

10. “Open Letter to an ICE Recruit”, Wayfarer Magazine

This is the most direct and openly political piece on the list. It addresses someone who may have joined ICE for understandable reasons: steady employment, structure, service, or the desire to protect a community. The letter asks what happens when those honorable instincts are placed at the disposal of an unjust system.

Drawing on Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” it argues that ordinary people cannot erase their responsibility by calling themselves instruments of policy. At some point, conscience requires refusal. Wayfarer Magazine's commitment to writing as a form of resistance and to voices willing to confront injustice made it a great home for the piece.

What the Year Has Taught Me

These ten pieces are not necessarily the ten best things I have written. They are the ones that, taken together, provide the clearest map of the year.

They move among childhood, education, faith, labor, immigration, neighborhood life, public systems, and the small forms of responsibility people assume for one another. Some are realistic. Others move toward fable, surrealism, or prayer. Several began with an image I could not stop thinking about: a bicycle chain, a fish in a gutter, flowers growing through asphalt, a trolley traveling beyond the end of its route.

A year ago, I did not know whether there would be publications willing to take all these different parts of my writing seriously. I am grateful to have learned that there are.

There have also been many rejections, unsuccessful experiments, abandoned drafts, and pieces that needed to be rewritten long after I thought they were finished. That is part of the record too. The past year has taught me that a writing life is built less through inspiration than through repeated acts of attention: returning to the page, finishing the piece, sending it out, and beginning again while the answer is still unknown.

There are more pieces scheduled to appear in the months ahead, and many more still circulating. For now, I am grateful for this first year, for the editors who opened their pages to my work, and for everyone who has taken the time to read it.

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