Why I Live at the P.O.

Today I received a "Thanks, but your story arrived outside of our submission period" letter from a literary journal. Except I'd mailed it a month before the closing deadline. I smell a disgruntled postal worker.

A few months ago, I got a "Thanks, but we're going to pass on this poem" response.

...

In case you don't know, dear reader, I only write prose. I guess it's safe to assume the journal didn't "get" my piece.

Guerrilla Reads

One month and one week later, at 5:18 AM, I finally found what I was looking for.

Read, listen, watch, be wined and dined.

Coco Heart

My Grandpa once heard a song on the radio that he loved. But the DJ didn't give the artist and song title, so my grandpa didn't know what the song was. He called up my father, described the song, and asked if he knew it. My father didn't. He called The Wherehouse (R.I.P.), and sang the part of the song he remembered. This is what that patient employee heard, in the voice of a Czechoslovakian immigrant...

"Co-co heart..."

This must have gone on for a few months, my grandfather asking us grandkids and anyone he came in contact with what this damn song was. Finally, the song came on while he was in the car with my dad. My Dad recognized the song as...

drumroll...

"Sacrifice" by Elton John. The lyric he mixed up was:

Cold, cold heart

Holy smokes! (as my grandfather would say), was he ever excited to have found his song! My Dad bought him the album, and then recorded "Sacrifice," over and over, on both sides of a tape. (Incidentally, this tape was in the glovebox of his car when he signed the title over to me. I keep it there. I like it there.) My grandpa loved to play this tape and listen to this song, his song, over and over.

Okay, so this is a long-winded route to a comparison. But the comparison I want to make is that, like my grandfather, there is something I once enjoyed but can no longer recall. Last month, I came across an online literary journal where submissions were made via a video of the author reading the work in a locale that's significant to the story/poem. It was so good, dammit! But I don't remember its title. I had thought I'd come across it in HTML Giant, but a search of their blog has been fruitless. Although I did find some awesomely-bad Photoshop work.

I swear, if I can find this audio-file-journal again, I will bookmark it, both in my long-term memory and computer memory. And maybe I'll dub my favorite audio file of theirs, over and over, on a tape.

Call and Response

The Summerset Review recently started a feedback program called the Fifty-for-Fifty Contest. Readers respond to a prose piece in the current issue, and the editors select and print the best ones. It's such a simple, smashing idea and I can't believe no one's thought of it before. Or at least, no one's thought to tell me. Check it out.