Pick up a bird

Pick up a bird by its bony head and ring it like a bell until it's springtime!

There are such things as exploding birds. As we drive into the hollows of our snowy county, a bush KABOOM sends a cloud of cardinals rising into the air. So maybe it is the bushes exploding with birds!

I noticed while I was in my bird-obsession not so long ago, that EVERYBODY writes about birds. But nobody loves birds the way I do. Nobody, no sirree.

Martin and I have been sending piles of poetry and short stories and essays off to journals and yesterday was a record day: four rejections between us; three of them were mine; two out of four were fairly stock rejections; Martin's had a note he described first as 'snarky' and then as jolly good because it referred to his poetry as "high energy" much as a tired parent might refer to their toddler. I got a great rejection from the Missouri Review asking to see more of my stories, so now I just need to write more. And I stayed up almost until midnight getting two more submissions ready, so as to make up somewhat for the rejections. It's a rewarding process :).

I have to say, it's much more fun to be rejected with someone else than by oneself. We almost bought dinner out to celebrate but we thought we'd wait: as Martin says, if we keep buying ourselves dinner every time we're rejected, we're going to be broke (between the two of us we've got, say, about 100 plus things out). Maybe we'll wait for an acceptance. There was that bright week when we both got accepted to two diffferent publications. It is a nice memory and we're swimming in our rejections with humor and comraderie. So far today neither one of us has been rejected, except by our children, which makes us feel all is right with the world.