some new material from my february residency is making it out into the world. it feels vulnerable, but also exciting. i also dropped a few new zines this month, and am in the process of planning a FRUITCAKE doubleheader of sorts for pride month.

• big news: the you stupid slut rerelease is now available for preorder, with a release date of July 21, 2026! it’s available at most major online booksellers, but i’d really love it if you bought it on Bookshop.org, or really anywhere that isn’t the bezos site.

• blah blah blah, zine reminders:

  • join my zine club.

  • download all my mini zines in one $10 digital bundle.

  • i’m selling physical zines on etsy.

  • follow all of my zine-related adventures @ramenzines on instagram.

• published poems: “fantasy: buying myself flowers,” “poem for raisins in the sun,” and “you need human touch” in The Bulb Region

• published poems: “breaking loose,” “cocoa hooves,” and “shrinkage” in electric pink issue 1

• published poems: “DREDGE” and “i am being so normal about desire” in BRUISER

• published poems: “crossing east 30th” and “throwing rice at people in a greetings & readings” in Does It Have Pockets? May 2026 Issue

• published poem: “emotional trash compactor” (online exclusive) and “wolf moon” in Strip Mall Magazine Issue 5

• published poem: “sonnet for shorter days” in Welter Spring 2026 issue

• published poem: “a gender” in Muzzle Magazine Spring 2026 issue

• upcoming attractions:

  • june 5: i’ll be reading poetry from with gasoline at Balancing Act: Performance and Protest. 6 p.m. @ Red Emma’s.

  • june 9: i’ll be reading virtually with the Dodo Eraser reading series. contact me or the mag to rsvp.

  • june 11: i’ll be hosting the pride month edition of FRUITCAKE with Stephanie Anderson, Yasmine Bolden, Carolyn DeCarlo, and Paige Ellen Passantino. 7 p.m. @ Ottobar (Upstairs).

  • june 29: i’ll be hosting and reading at Tropical Fruits, a new FRUITCAKE happy hour series that will also feature Rory Engle-Pratt and Kelsey Ko for the inaugural event. 7 p.m. @ Pink Flamingo.

notes

i have recently found myself reflecting on the ways i which i have healed, in addition to the ways in which i could still stand to do so. i’ve had a difficult year, and i think part of actually processing it has involved the series of poems i’ve written in the wake of some major life events that took place in the last 365+ days. there’s something about these things existing in this way on the page that feels correct to me; it breaks up a logjam of jumbled thoughts, in a sense, and allows me to communicate. but more importantly, i also feel like writing candidly about what’s on my mind is allowing me to consider its impact on me, good or bad or otherwise. it hasn’t been easy to continue to push myself to evolve based past experiences, but it has started to become rewarding to see the results. i’m trying to make my 30s a new era. here’s hoping.

sneak peek

i’m going to shamelessly promote some newer freelance projects in this section, as i have some stuff i’m very proud of!

1. i made this reel for my friend to promote their recent release with White Stag Publishing, and i had such a blast doing it. would love to see more social media/promo work in my pipeline!

2. i recently contributed to the Baltimore Beat’s 81st issue, aka the weed issue! those of you that have known me for a minute know that i used to work in the cannabis industry, so a strain review article was awesome to be asked to take on. i also wrote a “hot toke,” in addition to doing the illustrations for the article.

3. i’ve been consistently working on the flyers for Dodo Eraser’s virtual reading series, which have allowed me to push my aesthetic sensibilities in a decidedly punk/DIY direction. shoutout to Travis for the trust. (1 / 2 / 3)

please, please, please, please hit me up for freelance work! i’m happy to discuss your project ideas via email. check out my portfolio to get a sense of what i do. i also edit manuscripts!

what’s happening

• call: River River Books is open for poetry manuscript submissions until 5/31

• release: Fez Avery’s CLAYBOY is now available from Write Bloody Publishing. i had the unique pleasure of hosting Fez’ book launch for a recent FRUITCAKE event and it was a phenomenal night!

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss

• tv: Summer House, Southern Hospitality, The Real Housewives of New York (rewatch)

• games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Pokémon Violet

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

icymi, i reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i do not have a full-time job/steady income and appreciate any support i’m able to get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom of the page for payment links).

i came out later in life, and in a way, writing WANT was like discovering my own queer childhood for the first time. many of these memories also immortalize core aspects of my personality, which i now realize were always inextricable from the ways in which i am queer. these poems are a true, pure expression of myself in a way that a lot of my other work doesn’t quite touch.

selected works

• “a bad gay guard” and “your kiss” in JAKE

• “tumblr knew” in MEMEZINE

• “cheerleader handwriting” and “disclosure” in ink&ivy lit

praise for WANT

“This is a collection with elbows out. It doesn’t ask or beg for you to love it, it knows that it is lovable as it claims space, identity, and basks in our readership. Everything about WANT nailed the tight-rope-journey between luxuriously risky and a cozy homecoming. The speaker knows who they are, what they deserve, and how much they have to give to those around them. A delight to read, it will both fill you with yearning and the feeling of being completely satisfied.” —Bleah Patterson, author of THE INFLUENCERS ARE GASLIGHTING US

“Who were you when you knew you best? nat raum’s collection WANT explores the draft versions of the self through queer adolescence, how the pieces are all there but may not have the language to call itself home yet. Through a kaleidoscope of girls prep school uniforms, playground jaunts and taunts, and the colloquial charm of modern meme culture, a vision of youth being genderless and moving towards something unknown but also deeply known unfolds. This collection is a reclamation of the identifying language lost to every queer child before they knew there was even a name for themselves, a reclamation of the body lost to centuries of boy/girl. raum dances with gender, fluidity evident in every aspect, from form to flow, from one end of the spectrum down to the other, in rhythm with all that lies in between and beyond. An enchanting and vulnerable dissection of the body as concrete as well as abstract, WANT gets to the core of the thing; that before all the identity politics and the gendered names bestowed to us at birth and the clothing and toys that determine who we are to the people who don't know us, we always know ourselves best. But that’s a conversation for nat raum and you.” —Kayla Renee, author of Baby Grand

WANT is available for print purchase from ink&ivy lit.

things have been quiet over here as i sit in a holding pattern some of you may be familiar with: waiting on decisions from publications with long response times. i made it a goal to be more targeted in how and where i sent work out this year, and it’s certainly paying off to some degree. but this also means i find myself having fewer updates than usual, which i remind myself is fine. there’s a long life ahead of me.

• zine reminders:

  • join my zine club.

  • download all my mini zines in one $10 digital bundle.

  • i’m selling physical zines on etsy.

  • follow all of my zine-related adventures @ramenzines on instagram.

• published piece: “IF YOU WANNA FIGHT, FIGHT” in HAD

• published poem: “self-defense as celibacy” in Frozen Sea Issue 12

notes

the idea for a specter dust sequel is brewing. i’m not quite at the drafting stage yet, but i feel like as i have healed from the myriad fucked up things that have happened to me in the last year and a half, i’ve mostly been writing where the wind blows me rather than around the framework of a planned project.

as i work towards eventually executing this project, i’ve also been thinking about the fate of some of my older books, some of which may go out of print soon. it reminds me of a conversation i recently witnesses in a publishing listserv about “new and selected” volumes of living poets. i used to think there wasn’t really a use to something like this, that any such collection should absolutely happen posthumously. but someone in the thread brought up the idea of modern poets with indie releases that have gone out of print after just a few years,1 and i considered this idea more for a moment. the longevity of literature, for better or worse, is not what it used to be. all that is to say don’t be surprised to find me typesetting a long volume of out-of-print poetry in the next year.

sneak peek

this month, i am participating in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 project. this comes in conjunction with both National Poetry Month and , a writing challenge i completed last april. here’s one of the pieces from this month:

let’s play a love game


in the sense that i have never known
anything but pushing pawns around,

the morning after as my goal, and queenly
i am not. it’s all strategy—risk directly

proportionate to reward. i have never
claimed to be a saint. my voice rasps

at the first sign of spring and that’s when
i haven’t dragged an errant cigarette.

i’ll be lucky if i can breathe tomorrow
but that’s not the point. i’m the pawn.

i’m the embodiment of divided by zero,
so much nothing i am become void,

destroyer of romance. (if you keep pressing 
the same buttons, they’ll go numb eventually.)

if you like the poems (or even if you don’t), you can donate to Tupelo Press via my donation page to help fund my progress!

what’s happening

• call: MEMEZINE is open for our next issue until 5/312

• release: preorder Sadee Bee’s Celestial Bodies | Earthbound Wounds from White Stag Publishing

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: Sapello Son by Alejandro Lucero

• tv: Summer House, Southern Hospitality, The Real Housewives of New York (rewatch), House of Villains

• games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i am still out of work and appreciate any support i’m able to get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom of the page for payment links).

please also hit me up for freelance work! i’m happy to discuss your project ideas via email.

it took me a few years of publishing books to kick off a tour, namely because i was in graduate school when i dropped my debut, and an mfa workload plus an mfa budget do not generally equal a particularly organized, fruitful tour. even still, the way i did my tour could have been improved. i’m going to reflect on my tour experience for the benefit of the many of you i’m assuming have not been on tour, but have considered it for a past, present, or future book release. i’ll break down how i planned, the stops i made, and what i learned along the way.

i decided to go on tour around the time i read with at Red Emma’s in baltimore for her first book tour. i had a book i was particularly proud of releasing later that winter, and it felt like it was the perfect time. i kept a spreadsheet of venues, built from a list i created based on recommendations from friends around the country. i considered where i could reasonably travel for (relatively) cheap, and where i would be able to stay with friends instead of booking accommodations. i ended up touring in baltimore, d.c., philadelphia, new york, boston, and columbia, south carolina, with an unofficial stop in chicago after the fact.1

my first mistake came during the booking phase, when i thought that because it was a tour, everything needed to happen in rapid succession. i was ambitious, booking up every weekend for two months following the book’s release (excluding the winter holidays). i was doing this on top of a full-time 9-5 job and had no idea how unrealistic the expectations i’d just set for my own stamina were. in short, by the end of my tour, i was desperately ready for it to be over. i was exhausted, burnt out, steamrolled. i had scheduled thinking that book promo was a sprint, not a marathon. intense tour schedules are great if you have time and energy for them, but i did not. in hindsight, i would have scattered my dates over the year to follow my book’s release, rather than trying to knock out every city as close to release day as possible. it would have been more sustainable for both my health (physical and mental) and my income, and i don’t know why i didn’t do that instead.

i started in baltimore with a launch reading at The Club Car, a great queer venue that had just opened when i started booking dates. armed with 35 copies of my book, a set list, and a small group of friends, i read my work to a crowd of probably 8 people, including my partner at the time and my best friend. while it wasn’t the turnout i’d hoped for, and while i only sold books to 2 of my attendees, i still considered the night to be a success. i also did a surprise “second date” in baltimore via my reading series, FRUITCAKE, where a lot of people who weren’t able to make the original event came out and bought copies.

my next event was also a dedicated reading/book event, this time at the now-defunct Potter’s House in d.c. this was one of my most sparsely-attended events, with only my friend, another reader’s partner, and a random woman who bolted the second the reading was over. i didn’t realize it then, but i did consider later that my own promotional activities were not the only ones driving traffic to the event. support goes a long way—from the venues that book you, local friends and family, and other people on the ground in the city you’re touring in. event promotion is 100% a group effort, which can play a part in where you choose to book your event. Potter’s House, to their credit, did post extensively on social media about the event, so this isn’t a situation where the venue dropped the ball. rather, i think d.c. was an ambitious stop for me without a more established audience there.

after d.c., i went to philadelphia and read to a slightly bigger room at Wooden Shoe Books. i was lucky to be joined by a local photographer for this stop! i think this is also the stop where i felt like my accompanying readers (Kat Giordano and Veronica Bennett) were the most complementary to the book itself. this is a huge part of going on tour—whether it’s putting yourself in conversation with the right writers for a book talk, choosing the right panelists for a panel, or reading alongside the right people, the overall vibe of an event is part of what sells the book. it’s about piquing people’s interest and holding it throughout the entirety of the event. making sure you’re surrounded by the right people sets your event up for success in more ways than one.

i took a quick holiday break and did a rapid-fire series of stops in new york and boston just after the new year. new york, which was also a dedicated book event, became its own can of worms, with the venue i’d initially reached out to ghosting me a week before the event. a local contact told me this wasn’t uncommon for both the venue and the nyc poetry booking scene. luckily, i got a few recommendations from a friend in the area and was able to rebook my event at Dada, a lovely little arts café in ridgewood. this was my smallest audience, and i didn’t sell any copies of any of my books, but it was ultimately enjoyable and i still felt it was worth my time. and for an event pulled together at the last minute, i still found it to be lovely in its own way.

boston threw a wrench into my plans in that the venue i approached wanted to be sure there was a strong turnout at the event. this led to reading as a featured poet at Trident Booksellers’ open mic. i had wanted this tour to be something i curated myself, for everything to feel like it all belonged innately, so i was admittedly on the fence about this arrangement. the boston stop made me realize that i could have potentially been a bit more strategic about what kinds of events i was booking, in that i performed for by far my largest audience at this stop. i got to see two mostly-online literary friends, and i sold the last copies of my book i had with me. still, being the featured poet at an open mic opened the “wild card” can of worms. i started my set by inviting the listener to engage with care, as the content of the book is bracingly honest; i was followed by not one, but two poets decrying the courtesy of trigger warnings. it initiated me to the risk/reward spectrum of booking events. was it worth it to read to a big room when the audience didn’t seem to receive the work as i’d hoped? i’d had better experiences with this in the past, so i do want to say that i feel like this was a one-off. but it did make me realize that a room full of people doesn’t necessarily mean a room full of people who will understand and engage with your book in that way you’ve hoped for.

my last tour stop in columbia, sc unfortunately needs to be prefaced by a content warning for police involvement. it was not long after i checked into my hotel room that i received a call from the front desk: they weren’t seeing my payment on their end. a quick glance at my bank account showed me that i had indeed paid for my stay, so i pushed back. approximately an hour later, the columbia police department knocked on my door, offering me the choice to either pay the hotel again, leave, or be arrested. to this day, i don’t know if they clocked me as trans and whether that had anything to do with it, but what i can say is that it did not feel anything resembling safe to be a trans person alone at night with cops at my back and no place to stay in an unfamiliar city. i later found out that this hotel tried to charge my debit card over ten times for varying amounts. furthermore, i learned that most holiday inns are independently owned, making them nearly immune from corporate oversight. this ultimately turned into an expensive inconvenience, but felt like a cold and harsh reality of existing as a trans person in the u.s. circa 2025. this also turned into a psa: don’t stay at the holiday inn in downtown columbia. the owner is a scammer.

the reading, however, was lovely, and this was one of a few events where i did a q&a as well. this was also one of the only events where i explicitly booked at a queer venue (Queer Haven Books), and it made the difference, with a wonderful and engaged audience expecting me when i began to read. i chatted about the book, sold a bunch of copies, and ultimately connected with people in a community outside of the usual northeast city slicker legion of queers. despite the hardship i endured, i found this stop to still be worth it for these reasons. i had no choice but to turn it around—i was already in columbia, with no real way out, and so i had to make the best of a bad situation. it ended up being wonderful. the show must go on, as the cliché goes.

my tour ended where it started, in baltimore. i decided to officially cap the experience off with a reading and book talk at Red Emma’s, one of my favorite places to read in the city. i think the conversation helped stimulate curiosity regarding the book—i wholesaled 15 copies to the store and sold all but one of them that same night. it’s always a win when you get to let people in on the process in addition to the product; your audience will inevitably end up more engaged with what you’re selling, and you’ll sell more books. people want to feel connected to the book they’re reading, and book talks and q&a sessions help with this.

i curated my own events for the most part on this tour, so i don’t have as much experience reading at an tour event that isn’t explicitly about the book. but something i want to touch on as a booker of my own events is that people can tell when you think the show is all about you. booking within an established reading series or other event can be a great way to draw a bigger crowd, but be careful not to let the event become about your book—while you’ve accomplished something big and deserve to celebrate that, i find that if you want to spend a lot of time with the text, you’re better off booking your own event. what you may lack in audience numbers, you’ll make up for in audience members that actually want to be there. and when you book your own event, the schedule is up to you, and it also makes sense for the emphasis to be on your book. don’t try to take up a ton of space at a general reading or other event that isn’t explicitly about you; your host and audience will thank you for it.

i alluded to this earlier, but another thing to consider is the venue and what role they will play in promoting the event. you can do all the outreach you want, but part of booking in another city inherently means relying on both the venue and local supporting acts to do their part promotionally. the responsibility primarily falls on the main booker (aka you), but keep an eye on the venue’s social media and site to see what kind of promo they do. it’s fair to assume they have a strategy tailored to what works best for their audience, so don’t push them beyond what seems standard, but i’d also say don’t book at a venue that doesn’t seem to do much of any promotion—that’s just as much their job as it is yours. don’t book supporting writers that won’t at least share the event with people they’d want to attend. be authentic in where you’d like to be and who you’d like to ask, but also be strategic.

something i haven’t yet touched on is the sales numbers. i don’t keep meticulous track of how many books i sell, largely because every publisher i’ve worked with has done their sales reporting differently, and not everyone has given me hard numbers to track. but one thing i do know is that i’ve sold more copies of the book i did the tour for (this book will not save you) than any of my other releases, including my debut chapbook. there is no substitute for being able to hold up the book in front of an audience and read from it, explain to them what you were thinking when you wrote certain pieces, and then connect with those people after the event. combined with the energy of a debut, i can only imagine the combination to be absolutely electric.

i think it’s worth pointing out that touring isn’t accessible for everyone. not everyone is able to physically handle it, for one—as a disabled person, i stretched myself to my absolute limit, particularly while trying to travel inexpensively and on a tight timeline. not everyone has the monetary resources to shell out on a tour; while i was lucky to stay with friends almost everywhere i went, most presses (especially indie presses) are nowhere near having the resources to financially support a touring author. i’ve been told by my friend with a Big 5 contract that these sorts of marketing opportunities are baked into those contracts, but that the hefty advance accompanying these sorts of contracts is expected to “make up for” the expenses the author incurs going on tour. in short, tour expenses almost always come out of your own pocket, and my hotel fiasco showed me in real time that you always need to be prepared for incidentals.

what to do if you can’t tour? offer book events virtually. do as much locally as you can. take your book to open mics and read a piece or two. read at a virtual reading series. post on social media. these days, there are just as many ways to connect with potential readers online as there are in person. while it doesn’t necessarily replace the experience of meeting potential readers face to face in new cities, i definitely think that creative book promo includes some sort of event presence

as with most publishing-related things, there’s no exact science to going on tour. before you embark on this journey yourself, i highly recommend reaching out to people who have actually done it before—this is the number one thing i wish i had done, rather than going into it with next to no practical knowledge. something about the act of reading to an audience felt innate after a few years performing my poetry, but everything behind the stage performance was something i had to learn along the way. i’d absolutely do things differently during a future tour, and it’s something i’m seriously thinking about as i inch toward my 2026 and 2027 releases—where to read, who to invite, and whether to tour at all.

i’d almost rather perform mostly locally at this point, without the stress of curating and booking my own events. but i also see the value that touring provided me in the past, and the audience members i would have never gotten to connect with otherwise. i see the value to a conservative city’s queer community, gathered in a small bookshop to hear a visiting writer speak. and i see the value to the broader literary ecosystem, in which literary events don’t happen if no one makes them happen. all of this considered, i find myself reluctantly pro-tour. like most creatively-adjacent things, you get out of a tour what you put into it. my parting advice is to be deliberate about what you’re putting into it.

life took a steamroller to me in the last month in terms of how busy i’ve been, so it’s probably a good thing i don’t have as much to share right now. that said, as usual, i have some really cool stuff in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

• quick zine reminders:

  • join my zine club.

  • download my mini zines in one $10 digital bundle.

  • i’m selling physical zines on etsy.

  • follow all of my zine-related adventures @ramenzines on instagram.

• published poems: “iris von everec cleans her palette” and “do you guys ever think about dying?” in The Bloomin’ Onion

• published prose: “mothers” and “fathers” in moth eaten mag issue iv: birth

• announcement: my next full-length poetry collection, origin trilogy, will launch in 2027 with Sundress Publications!

notes + sneak peek

AWP took over my life this month, so no notes or sneak peek from me right now. check back next month!

what’s happening

• call: Host Publications is open for poetry manuscript submissions until 6/1

• release: Aurora Comes Online by Haley Bossé is out now with Game Over Books

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: Spree by Lily Herman

• tv: House of Villains, Southern Hospitality

• games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i am still out of work and appreciate any support i’m able to get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom of the page for payment links).

please also hit me up for freelance work! i’m happy to discuss your project ideas via email.

what i mean is that i can talk and talk and talk and only scratch the surface of why i am the way i am. i sound like cole sprouse—you know, i’m weird. i’m a weirdo. but—and i hope this would be obvious—you don’t write about trauma all the time out of some sick desire to re-experience it. i am unfortunately shaped by the actions of others in a way i am still unsure if i will ever unlearn. this isn’t my warning label—at least, not yet. it’s my reminder that there’s usually a lot more than meets the eye, even if what you see is as talkative as i am.

i’ve shockingly never written about witcher’s curse of the black sun, the prophecy that says all the girls born at the precise wrong moment will only ever live a harsh, violent existence. at the end of blood and wine, syanna talks about being viewed through this lens, how it affected the way people treated her and ultimately pushed her to murderous acts. i wonder sometimes if the stars can get it wrong. i wonder sometimes if it’s possible to be doomed from the start.

i say all of this because sometimes i refuse to believe what i’ve seen, the cruelty of others and the ways we convince ourselves that there is only what is best for us, not what is best for everyone. it’s worth noting that in this particular iteration of late-stage capitalism, we have been trained to be this individualistic, forgoing actual historical evidence that human beings function better as a collective that looks out for each other.

in particular, my experience with dating cisgender, heterosexual, white men has been what misandrists would tout as par for the course. i’m not going to lie to you and say i’m an easy person to date, but the phenomenon i am talking about transcends my actions and shines a spotlight on the ways in which society has conditioned these men to bottle up feelings instead of communicating them.

these are lessons i was forced to learn growing up socialized as a girl: use your words. you can’t get what you want if you don’t ask. communicate clearly and calmly, lest a man think you are hysterical. i am immensely proud of the ways in which i have been able to manage the manifestations of borderline personality disorder in my life. still, i have triggers, and after this long being shoved aside, disregarded, and written off by men, i’d be lying if i said that i was always able to manage my response to those triggers perfectly. i am capable of extreme rage—but i very rarely access it. in this way, i am a beehive. i think if you poke a beehive enough, you deserve to be stung.

i hadn’t intended to launch into a diatribe about men and trauma survivorship, but i think it underscores my point that there is a haunting within me that i am desperately trying to get rid of. as the title of cazzie david’s memoir so astutely declares: no one asked for this. i don’t talk about (and write about) everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life because i am hungry for more of it. i was taught to use my words—and what i am saying is enough; i don’t want this. everything i do is in service of my desire to heal from these wounds.

i don’t (or at least shouldn’t) need to list off my traumas for people to believe me, but just as a matter of record: i have been in three outwardly abusive relationships, a variety of manipulative situationships, and have been sexually assaulted more times than i can count or remember. i lost one of my best friends in a housefire when i was eleven and carried this unresolved grief into a relationship with a man who later proudly declared rape culture was fake. i started drinking in college and blacked out early and often, allowing me to both lower my inhibitions and be taken advantage of repeatedly.

this is not a plea for sympathy—mostly, i am trying to set the scene, establish the undercurrent of what my old therapist called capital-T trauma before i diagram the thousand papercuts that ultimately wore me down enough to write this essay. i’m tired of a lot of things, but i feel like my point here is the way in which someone can read my words and feel like they know me despite there being countless layers to this shit—layers i am still sifting through myself. when i say i feel like people don’t really know me, what i am talking about is that it’s not hard to know my story, but i keep the way i actually feel about it all under lock and key.

furthermore, all this discussion of capital-T trauma leaves very little room for the more minor slights, things like family ties and my elementary school friend copying my every move and existing in a disabled body. my baseline is often exhausted, and this leads me to places i wish i didn’t have to go, both emotionally and interpersonally. there are two options when i am upset: i lock in or i check out. locking in looks like fire; checking out looks like ice. i’m still not sure which is worse.

the point to all of this is that although my surface is plentiful, there is still more to it than is immediately perceptible. this is true of anyone, but i feel the need to state this because part of building an audience is establishing boundaries. there’s a wide gap between peer and friend for me, and i am unfortunately likely to downgrade friends who aren’t willing to uphold their end of the social contract.

dr. han vanderhart recently said on bluesky that they “have never seen a contemporary poem that borrowed language from a peer’s poem that was better than the original poem.” discussions emerged about what it meant to be better, whether better was really even the goal, but as a prolific poet in a landscape suddenly saturated with “after” poems, i can’t help but feel like my words end up twisted some of the time—or worse, recontextualized into something with no substance, that misunderstands the point of why i wrote in the first place.

and i write to process. i write to grieve, to grapple, to say things that are burning inside me for one reason or another. i do not put words on the page lightly, and feel strongly about every choice being purposeful. i think this can give off the impression that i’m extremely precious about drafting when that’s not the case, but i am intentional, and this means that my work means a lot to me.

i often struggle with the idea that while i do these things because they are innate to me, others don’t have the same motivations behind creating. i am all for art for art’s sake, but sometimes the heavy riff off someone else’s work should stay in the drafts. exercises can be just that—exercises. furthermore, i’m a believer that you can put a spin on the concepts and subjects presented in the work of someone else without copying, and that often this starts with abandoning the idea of using that person’s own words.

i’d be remiss if i didn’t discuss the phenomenon of creating for clout and how dangerously close it comes to the worst parts of stan culture. there’s something that comes across as pick-me about, for example, the way people interact on twitter with richard siken like he’s their best friend. some people will do anything to be noticed, and it’s why—although it’s not how i would handle it—i fundamentally get it when siken is sometimes less than cordial in return.

in the age of the internet more than ever, we often form parasocial relationships with creatives whose work we admire. we think that because this person’s work understands us in some way, that the creator themself understands us on a personal level. this is, of course, not true—i am often humbled by the ways in which my work reaches people, but to say that i should maintain a friendship or even an acquaintanceship with every single person who relates to my work would be unfair to both me and those people.

there is often a lot of pressure on public figures (and i use this term loosely, as i do not consider myself to be one) to present themselves a certain way to their audiences. there is a desire for consistency, empathy, and kindness. you can see where this is going, and it’s somewhere in the vein of one of my favorite memes: is mastercard a queer ally? is this tv show my friend? in this case, the ask boils down to is this person i don’t know personally responsible for interacting with me like a friend would?

of course, there is nuance, the idea of friendship and closeness is relative, and i do believe that we owe each other at least basic kindness. but there is a level of boundary-creeping that has grown more pronounced as social media encourages us to share parts of ourselves online, in which fans of artists, bands, and even writers are interacting with their faves in ways that clearly misunderstand the relationship between a creative and their audience.

you are not owed attention from or access to your favorite writers. idolatry is a slippery slope. and while it’s lovely to be inspired by someone, it’s also okay to take a step back and think for yourself. if that sounds harsh, it’s not because i mean it maliciously—i think there is so much beauty in poetry where the writer is so distinctly themself, exploring niches no one else could dream of and crafting something thoroughly unique.

not to shout myself out, but sterling-elizabeth arcadia recently blurbed my forthcoming collection and said “there is little that is hotter than getting to see a writer learning themself in the moment.” this is a statement i thoroughly agree with, and it doubles down on the importance of maintaining a clear and singular sense of self throughout the writing process. the poetry that’s the most exciting to me is not the most tightly tooled, sparse, matter-of-fact narrative poem, but the poem where the writer is digging at parts of themself, of humanity, surfacing them in the process of writing.

this doesn’t mean a poem has to be vulnerable. there are clearly many successful cases where a writer is doing something other than baring their whole self on the page and puts together a slam dunk of a poem. but when a poem by one person is so clearly rooted in someone else’s expressions of self and conceptions of craft, it takes the joy of reading it out of me. the beauty of a saturated landscape of poetry is the emergence of new ideas, not the regurgitation of others’. just because nothing is original doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

i remember when i first started writing poetry, i wrote a gender poem that was loosely inspired by the glass animals album dreamland. i sent it to a fan contest for glass-animals inspired art and writing and was beaten by a poem that (basically) just quoted “agnes” back at the reader. this was the first time i watched someone else’s words be, for lack of a better word, cannibalized. the poetry in “agnes” was no longer an experience, but a consumable.

this is actually what i fear as i continue my writing career—my words becoming widespread enough that they reach an audience far outside of that for whom i actually write. beyond writing to understand and be understood, i write for everyone who has ever felt even a fraction of the things i am constantly feeling. i have always made work for myself, but i have always shared it with the world in solidarity with those who can unfortunately relate. i think that’s why it hurts to be vulnerable and then have that vulnerability commodified through mimicry—by all means, please feel inspired by me, but keep the end result focused on yourself. don’t try to wear my skin. it’s better for us all.

i feel almost curmudgeonly as i approach 30.1 i’ve been publishing with any actual “success” since i was 25. i’ve seen a variety of different landscapes both pop up and disappear in the time i have been in the literary community. i am grateful to have discovered a sense of both community and support, and do feel for the first time as a creative that i have found my ideal audience. at the same time, i wonder about this culture of constantly riffing off our peers in place of actual collaboration and writerly co-learning.

it’s a way i see individualism (and in turn, the concept of clout) return to the party—we see something we like and think i wish i had done that. how could i do that? and instead of diving deeper on a craft level, we assume it’s a selection of words doing all the work. a well-crafted poem is always greater than the sum of its parts, and to me, evokes emotion. how can one poet evoke another poet’s emotions? this is why my personal philosophy to writing after other poets starts and ends at thematic or formal similarities. i can’t possibly aim to understand why a poet strung together words in the way they did or, as dr. vanderhart said, do it better.

i also ask what happens when privilege intersects with “after” poetry. the only real rule to erasure poetry is not to “erase down,” or redact a text that, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, is not the poet’s story to tell. the same can be said for the borrowing of lines, particularly from poems by marginalized poets that discuss identity or selfhood. simply put, i’m firmly of the opinion that when a writer in a position of relative privilege tries to borrow from the experience of a marginalized poet, it’s a hard no. this is true of all genres, but i feel like poets get the easiest pass, with all our discussions about poet vs. speaker. unlike memoir, the speaker of a poem doesn’t necessarily mean the poet themself—and while persona poetry is a valid form in its own right, similar rules to erasure should apply where some topics are concerned.

i don’t view the “after” poem as a plague, but i think it’s a tool that could be wielded with more intentionality. i don’t think it’s inherently wrong to be inspired by other people creating in the same moment as you. fuck pablo picasso, but a broken clock is right twice a day, and so is picasso’s assertion that good artists copy, while great artists steal. doubling down, bill powers once critiqued an artist on bravo’s short-lived series work of art: the next great artist by saying that their work was definitely a “borrow.” if you are going to be inspired by the work of someone else, do that person the respect of understanding it. steal, don’t copy.

and what i mean by steal is to own and make your own. i mean to get to the bottom of the craft, the why of the ways in which the poem is working for you. maybe it’s the variation in the sentence structure of a prose poem, the patterns and cycles laid out in poems like the ghazal and the pantoum, the perfect enjambment in free verse. either way, there is a why to the poem beyond the simple selection of words, and there is a reason for those words specifically. this is obvious information to even a casual reader of poetry, but i do think it bears repeating that everything plays a part in a successful poem—the title, the line breaks, the word choice, everything.

and i don’t mean plagiarize—or rip off, which i actually think is worse. i shouldn’t have to say the first part, and i should hope it’s obvious, so i won’t elaborate there. but to speak to the second, i think when a poem uses the words, ideas, and other core aspects of the practice of another writer as its true heart, the poet has lost the battle against poetry. the constant evolution of language also means the necessity for poetry to constantly evolve. if we’re instead constantly tracing our peers’ footsteps, that evolution can never happen. something truly unique can never happen.

as i present it, steal implies a learning process, an understanding that we are lifelong learners, even those of us that are educators. if you don’t continue to absorb craft in a way that also synthesizes it, the end product is almost definitely going to be derivative at best and lackluster at worst. i don’t do a lot of craft reading, but i meticulously study the poems that ignite a fire in me—their verve, their rhythm, their lines (as a professor of mine once put it) as units of possibility—to figure out the entire scope of what makes them each such a knockout. then i apply these lessons to my own writing.

to circle it back to myself: i do what i do for a reason, and what i perceive to be a good reason. without my writing and art practices, i don’t know where i would be now from a healing standpoint. i don’t expect every poet to have a why that is so strongly rooted in something other than a love for the game, but i do think that you have to at least love the game, and that means both listening and learning from your peers’ work. it also means not ripping them off every chance you get.

being a writer doesn’t have to be a competition or a clout chase—it’s okay to do things simply because you enjoy them. i am advocating for deeper enjoyment, more intentional inspiration. i am advocating, perhaps, for something more visceral than simply writing. i am advocating for a more intense cultivation of passions, more of an obsession. i learned young that life can be cut short in an instant. if you’re not doing it because you live and breathe it, what’s really the point?

i just turned 30 earlier this month. wow. a moment of silence for my 20s, and three cheers for the fact that i’ve been alive for 3 decades. i’ve decided in a somewhat unofficial capacity to support myself with my art/as a freelancer for as long as i am able to, with the hopes of making this a stable source of income down the line. this is a big leap, but i think it’s a leap that my mental health has been asking me to make for a while. so with that in mind, let’s do the news.

• first, keep up with my zines:

  • join the zine club i started. $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3–5 zines every quarter, or it’s $7-10 for a monthly mailing of 2–3 zines (priced depending on whether you’re inside or outside the usa).

  • you can now download my mini zines (all 20+!!! of them) in one $10 digital bundle if you want to support my practice. a reminder that they are always free to download individually, too.

  • i’m also selling physical zines on etsy. i am trying to add at least 3 new zines to the shop a month, and am also adding sporadic sticker and print options.

  • lastly, you can (and should) follow all of my zine-related adventures @ramenzines on instagram.

• published poem: “downtown as fruits” in Silly Goose Press’ Winter Whimsy Web Series

• published poems: “i take it very seriously” and “desperately seeking spark” in electric pink

• published poems: “i want to fall in love but instead i feast,” “poem in which the horrors persist,” “serial killing is a hobby, not a career,” and “sonnet for my fucking sanity” in Bullshit Lit

• published poem: “corvid haters unfollow immediately” in Some Words

• (re)published poem: “haworthia fasciata” in ALOCASIA: 99 queer writers on plants and nature1

• published photographs: three outtake polaroids from the fine line in HORNS Issue 5

• published poem: “ain’t never been wise” in Beaver Magazine Issue 14

• published poem: “grief as a blistered shishito” in ballast 4.1

• published poem: “decomposure” in JAKE

• new chapbooks:

  • dry stoner is now available to preorder from Troublemaker Firestarter, dropping in just 6 days!

  • (e)laments, my collaborative micro with D.W. Baker, is now available to preorder from Stone Corpse Press, dropping in just 3 days!

notes

on the topic of expanding my zine practice, i recently starting putting together a collaborative zine of sorts with my friends in which we all anonymously share our old, cringe creative work. i’ve made a bunch of new zines this year, actually! it’s been broadly fun to explore other methods of making beyond writing, and even writing some of my more text-heavy nonfiction zines has brought its own sort of creative joy. it’s been nice to reimmerse myself in a creative life.

sneak peek

to that end, here are a few recent zine spreads of mine that i particularly like!

what’s happening

• call: icymi, Bullshit Lit has reopened for online features subs!

• release: Remi Recchia’s collection Addiction Apocalypse just released with Texas A&M Press

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books:2 Still My Father’s Son by Nora Hikari, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes by Nicky Beer, House of McQueen by Valerie Wallace, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown, Lemonworld & Other Poems by Carina Finn, Thin Glass by Christine Degenaars, Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort, Swan by Mary Oliver, Heirloom by Ashia Ajani, There Should Be Flowers by J. Jennifer Espinoza, Year of the Unicorn Kidz by jason b. crawford

• tv: Southern Charm, The Traitors (U.S.), Summer House

• games: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i am still out of work and appreciate any support i’m able to get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom of the page for payment links).

please also hit me up for freelance work! i’m happy to discuss your project ideas via email.

starting off this year with a busy news day! let’s get right to it.

• zine housekeeping: this is a reminder that you can still join the zine club i started to pull in a bit of extra income. $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3-5 zines every quarter, or $7-10 for a monthly mailing (depending on whether you’re inside or outside the usa). two of the most recent quarter’s zines, BUBBLING and the time is ripe, are now available for free download on my itch.io

  • i’ll also be bringing my zines to the Baltimore Zine Fest on 1/24 at Peabody Heights Brewery, selling from 2–6pm. i’ll have print copies of everything in my library along with a brand-new release.

  • as an aside, and if it wasn’t already clear: i am working on expanding my zine practice! you can now download all my zines in one $10 digital bundle if you want to support. i’m also selling physical zines on etsy, and you can follow all of my zine-related adventures @ramenzines on instagram.

• published poems: “casting spells with drugstore roses,” “i’d begin at the beginning,” “pantoum for patterns,” “phillips square, friday afternoon” and “the hole” in

• published poem: “pseudotsuga menziesii (artificial)” in Some Words

• published poems: “my body doesn’t understand itself, electric” and “instagram keeps sending me” in Michigan City Review of Books

• published prose: “sorry” in shoegaze literary issue 2: act of attrition

• published poem: “there’s layers to this shit” in Burial Magazine

• published nonfiction: “after love” in JAKE

• published poem: “garden suburb hermit” in Dodo Eraser Issue 1

• published poems: “gatekeeping my own suffering,” “grave hag genesis,” and “rush hour” in BRUISER

• published poems: “apologies” and “democracy” in petrichor 29’s Pebbles section

• published poems: “there’s all these rings in my chart” and “essex diner, saturday morning” in Troublemaker Firestarter Volume 10: fairweather1

• new microchapbook: icymi, my poetry micro, totaled, is now available for free download from Artists from Maryland

• poetry book spreadsheet: i have brought back the spreadsheet i made in 2024 of upcoming 2026 poetry releases—please add your own chapbooks and full-lengths if you’ve got them! this sheet is based on one i came across in 2023, and it was excellent for finding new reads.

notes

behold, one line from every piece of writing i published in 2025! i look forward to a quieter 2026, but i’ve also already got some exciting things planned. i’ve decided this is going to be a year that begins with furiously pouring my efforts back into my practice in all ways, so please reach out if you’d like to work together on a creative collaboration!

sneak peek

here’s a poem from WANT, my new chapbook coming soon with ink&ivy lit!

token straight friend 

there’s a rumor that all-girls prep schools 
are an incubator for a certain kind of woman  
& i can’t attest to the school’s involvement but i saw  
the best minds of my generation decide they were gay 
as fuck & i didn’t budge, not then. my friend group
slowly came out around me & i insisted on my love 
for a man (& i suppose he felt he owed me nothing, 
but that’s a different conversation). i saw the lips 
of my friends intertwine in prom pictures & i still 
can’t explain the envy i felt despite my insistence 
that i was straighter than a plastic ruler.
oh, how mistaken i could be. 

friends

• call: Abode Press is open for 2026 Virtual Retreat applications until 3/7 (i did this retreat last summer and it was excellent!)

• release: Evelyn Berry’s chapbook T4T is now available to purchase from Small Harbor Publishing

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. by Noor Hindi

• tv: Southern Charm, The Traitors (U.S.)

• games: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Pokémon Legends: Z-A

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i am still out of work and appreciate any support i’m able to get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom of the page for payment links).

finally, those of you that follow me on other socials may know i have (hopefully temporarily) lost access to unemployment and have set up a gofundme. i met my initial goal, but am leaving it open through my hearing date on 2/2 to hopefully accumulate some sort of emergency fund.

please also hit me up for freelance work! i’m happy to discuss your project ideas via email.

i’ve long felt that trans anger deserves to take up space, and that it’s rarely if ever granted that space. as someone who’s been told to suppress “negative” emotions most of my life, writing with gasoline—a collection of angry poems about the trans experience—felt almost like a manifesto of sorts.

with gasoline is a poetry chapbook which defiantly carves out a space for trans anger in an increasingly hostile world, where trans people often have to conform to a sanitized image of a polite, pliable, and otherwise "perfect" trans person to be accepted by society—if they are accepted at all.

selected works

• “poem for the cishet woman who says including transmasc people in ‘women’s’ issues isn’t relatable to her personally,” “poem after executive order,” “poem from my deathbed,” “poem in which a tech bro thinks i am mentally ill” in en*gendered

• “poem in which i terrify boomers” (as “poem for myself, for i will never do anything for a transphobe again”) in Queerlings

• “poem after a student at my university got on the mic at graduation and said trans people didn’t exist” and “poem as instructions for survival” in Boudin

• “poem for drinking down that gin and kerosene” in Moist Poetry Journal

praise for with gasoline

“A vibrant trans celebration, ‘with gasoline’ is a Molotov thrown at heteropatriachy that ignites a vicious fire. Defiantly calling to attention ordinary and extraordinary transphobia, this collection bares its teeth at the world and refuses to take “no” for an answer. The author’s succinct and biting language gives their anger a beautiful clarity that resonates beside their unending resolve for embodying trans joy. If apathy and despair are getting the better of you in these times, ‘with gasoline’ is the fuel you need to rebirth your phoenix.” —Sarah Klein, author of Mast Cell Mathematics: A Chronic Illness Calculus

“‘with gasoline’ offers an explosive bouquet of occasional poems for uncommon times, whether after cruel executive orders, during frustrating focus group conversations, or perilous moments that demand one’s survival instincts. Their poems’ propulsive engine is fueled by righteous anger, moral clarity, and political courage. raum takes aim at transphobes, billionaires, bootlickers, boomers, and milquetoast liberals alike—in other words becoming “your worst fucking nightmare”—to help us envision instead a future of trans liberation.” —Evelyn Berry, author of Grief Slut and T4T

with gasoline is available for print and digital purchase from kith books.

first, i’m going to repeat the advice that i got from a professor in my MFA program who also ran a small press: if you wait until you’ve got a book coming out to get on social media and talk about your work, you are too late. it takes time to build an audience, and it also comes off pretty transparently as what it is—taking to twitter, instagram, etc. for the sole purpose of selling books. in this case, as a publisher myself, i would almost argue it’s better to have no social media presence at all than to join late in the game.

that is absolutely not to say that having some sort of following online is useless or doesn’t matter. as i also mentioned in my last essay, even Big 5 presses expect the author to engage in promotional efforts for the book. if you don’t have the budget to go on tour, online efforts are crucial to the success of the book. drawing on my own experience as a publisher, i have absolutely sold books in cases where the author has limited to no online reach, but the scatterplot of sales and social media presence does correlate in ways that aren’t favorable to those of us that would prefer not to be on socials.

this is all, unfortunately, to say that building a platform as an author matters. your book could be amazing, life-changing, one-of-a-kind, the list goes on—if readership is even a tangential goal, you are almost definitely going to have to find a way to promote your book online. i engage in a variety of marketing efforts as a publisher, and sometimes even that is not enough to sell books in a way that moves the needle. i think of marketing a book as chiseling away at a marble block; small, sustained efforts eventually yield success.

here’s the thing, though: being on social media and talking about your book does not have to look like hawking your work every single time you post. i’ve stated before that i prefer to follow writers who use their accounts to talk about things other than writing sometimes. no one wants to follow the person who is constantly promoting their own work—especially if that person is not also regularly promoting the work of their friends, peers, and colleagues. community matters, especially in small press communities where everyone is really just passing the same $20 around until we all die. as an audience member, i want to see what else you’re reading, what else you occupy your time with that might inform your writing. i want to see who you align yourself with and what lit mags are on your radar. simply put, i want to interact with a person, not a brand.

i use some combination of twitter, bluesky, instagram, substack, youtube, and discord to get my work out there, in addition to maintaining a personal website. i’ve settled into a strategy that, to me, feels organic and authentic for the way my creative practice works. in my opinion, that should always be the ultimate goal of a social media strategy. i’ve long told my publishing students and workshop participants that any system they create to organize their submissions should work perfectly (or pretty close) for them—otherwise, it’s useless. i feel similarly about social media and online presence; the name of the game is often authenticity, and if it doesn’t work, it’s going to feel forced. so let’s break it down by platform, shall we?

twitter

ahhhh, the place where it all really began for me, writing-wise. unfortunately, that iteration of littwt left a long time ago, and what remains in its place is a fractured landscape of edgelords, people who call it X unironically, and actual cool people. i don’t really have a strategy to using twitter anymore; i sometimes will chuck a writing post into the void and sometimes people will like it. most sustained, “organized” efforts at marketing on twitter that i have seen don’t generate nearly the kind of engagement that they seek to gain, or even that they would have three years ago. this is not at all to say that there’s no value in promoting your book on twitter, but moreso that these days, the main benefit of continuing to use twitter is forming community with people who are publishing similar work. and of course, there’s still a chance you won’t reach those people, as many writers have made an exodus to other platforms.

for my posting strategy, i stick to text-based posts most of the time and am careful about what links i post, as the new tool of an owner got mad that people were posting where they were headed after quitting twitter, nerfing links to external social media sites. what that means is that the algorithm devalues those posts and shows them only to your absolute most dedicated followers, if that. normal web links are generally acceptable, but if there’s even a hair of social media in there, you can forget about visibility.

bluesky

probably the closest thing to twitter in terms of its actual functionality, but i don’t find the visibility to be nearly as good because of the chronological algorithm. the way i gain traction on bluesky posts is old-school social media marketing: posting at peak times, resharing posts multiple times to catch folks who may have missed it before, and encouraging other people to share things. the community seems to have taken to the idea of the last part because of how this algorithm is driven—i find the rate of reshare is a lot higher on bluesky posts as a whole, and i try to do my part by reposting things from people i follow and want to help out.

in terms of actual posting strategy, i tend to gravitate towards links over image-based posts, partly because i staunchly add alt text to everything i post.1 unlike twitter, links aren’t nerfed, and with many publications popping up online, it’s a slam dunk way to share new work when it comes out. the caveat is that i personally am bad at forming habits and often have to remind myself to post to bluesky. this is definitely also compounded by the fact that bluesky doesn’t have a native scheduler—i don’t personally schedule tweets, but i use this function on twitter and instagram for my press all the time, and it does mean that our bluesky often falls by the wayside.

ultimately, even social media experts are still learning about bluesky strategy, and my guess is that because it is a relatively new platform, we will see significant changes in how it works at some point in the future. this information is all accurate as of the time of publication, but who knows?

instagram

if you’d told me three years ago that instagram would be my most valuable tool for promoting my books, i would have one thousand percent laughed in your face. but with the demise of twitter, i’m finding this to be increasingly true—even though it comes with the added lift of creating image or video content, i see consistent engagement on instagram, probably in no small part due to the fact that i’ve been using the platform since 2011 and have built an audience of mostly friends and supportive peers there.

there are definite rules to this algorithm, which prioritizes photo posts with faces in them, carousel posts, and video content. i try to keep “graphic” posts to a minimum, and try to include multiple slides when i can. an example of this is the roundup of work i had nominated for best of the net, or my holiday gift guide post. i don’t find “excerpt” graphics of poems to be particularly impactful when posted by someone other than the publisher—just stick to previously published work and post the whole piece. the algorithm inherently punishes graphic-based content anyway, so my philosophy is that i want to give my post the highest possible chance of being reshared, liked, or commented on. the answer here is often more: more slides, more sneak peeks, more visually interesting elements. i also love including a photo of me reading live from my book in my photo dumps when it fits.

to speak to video content, i am also of the generation that refuses to succumb to viral trends for the possibility of more reach. my main source of video content is videos from my live readings, and most of the rest of my feed is a mix of posts like the ones i just shared and personal photo dumps. i use canva or adobe premiere to easily caption these videos for accessibility. there’s always ways around this if you don’t do a lot of live events, or aren’t comfortable posting your face,2 but i have seen the engagement return on video posts, and it’s definitely worth trying.

this is also the only site where i do still find value in using hashtags. instagram has a per-post limit of 30 hashtags, and i definitely recommend both researching tags for your specific niches and looking at what tags other people within your communities are using. the meta algorithms are often mysterious, arbitrary, and notably far from perfect, so this gives it another chance to pick your posts up.

substack

those of you that have been here a while know exactly how i use substack: i post a monthly newsletter, an occasional essay, and generally fuck off into the void. this is a holdover from the old days of substack, before notes and restacks and other tools on this site that encourage writers to socialize with each other. yes, substack has added a variety of social media functions, and many writers have found their ultimate post-twitter home here. for me, this is a bit overwhelming as someone still using twitter and also a twitter-alternative, but i don’t want to discount it at all as a valuable tool for connecting with potential readers.

substack offers writers in particular a lot. the post function allows for long-form content, which can be used a variety of ways. if you’re new here, i mostly use my substack to publish a monthly newsletter, with this essay series being a relatively new addition to the mix. i also have a series i affectionately dubbed “bookstacks,” which is a spotlight on each of my published books with blurbs/praise, links to reviews and interviews, a bit about the creation of the project, and links to published pieces from the book. this year, i also did a holiday gift guide.

the newsletter format is extremely popular, and for me, it also solves the problem of not wanting to constantly bombard my supporters with new publications, announcements, and other news. monthly is a good cadence for me to provide practice updates, but others who publish less frequently might consider bimonthly or quarterly. when i was regularly publishing bookstacks, i was also posting those about once a month. unless you are providing other content and/or working with guest posters, a monthly post feels like the sweet spot for me.

on other functionalities: i don’t personally use the notes function a whole lot, and i don’t use my subscriber chat at all, but some communities really enjoy using these features. additionally, you can create a paywall on your substack, offering monthly or yearly memberships in exchange for benefits you choose. some writers do offer paid subscriber content, while i have chosen to keep the pool (and “hard pills to swallow”) 100% free, with paid subscriptions serving as a donation for me and my time.3

youtube

i really only use youtube for one thing: posting videos of myself reading. these are usually crossposts from my instagram feed, and occasionally i’ll use the youtube link to embed them on my website as well. of course, you could also take it to the next level and start streaming, or create video content about your practice outside of a reading setting. i personally put next to no effort into my youtube channel, but i sort of see it as similar to maintaining a facebook page as a business: it’s additional, low-effort visibility you might not have had otherwise.

discord

we’ve looped all the way back around to “finding and building communities,” you guys! we’re in the home stretch!

let’s start with my biggest advice: don’t use discord like a post-based site. focus on forming community, not self-promotion. when i was first studying social media marketing, i learned about the phases of a purchase and what social media platforms corresponded to those phases. this was before discord’s meteoric rise in popularity, but i can emphatically say that discord is not a good platform for sales or promotion—people go on discord to connect with friends and other people with shared interests, not to be sold a product. it comes off as disingenuous at best to read a discord message that has obviously been copied and pasted across a wide swath of servers, and some communities may have additional rules in place about crossposting like this.

this isn’t to say don’t share your book on discord, but rather, to be intentional about the communities in which you participate. there isn’t a tangible way to track impressions (or message views) on discord, and probably for good reason. where i’m going with this is that discord is simply not a good platform for mass visibility—it is primarily a social site. approaching discord servers with a gotta-catch-em-all, promotional attitude is bound to fail, especially if a server is primarily focused on community building. in these spaces, people want to feel reciprocation, like you’d also be excited to hear their news and want to share it just as widely. this only works when there is no transactional feeling to sharing work with the community. in the simplest of terms, be a good community member and people will want to support you.

personal websites

so you’ve run down this entire list and said, eh, not for me. that’s fine, but you probably still need to at least have a personal website. at the very least, if you’re not winning the seo wars for your name, this gives you a chance to carve out a place on the internet where people can go and know for sure they are connecting with you, not someone with the same name who does something completely unrelated. your site doesn’t have to be fancy, or even shell out the cash for a custom domain name. i think of Ally Waldon’s site as a successful, simple website—she has a quick introduction, links to her published works, and not much else.

alternatively, you could go big. my website doubles as an extensive web archive of my practice since about 2016.4 if you’ve got a lot of work to put online and don’t feel like doing it yourself, many freelance web designers are out there (including yours truly, who is still out of work right now). the short-term expense will pay off in the end when a potential publisher, client, or collaborator finds you easily online, in addition to or even despite a lack of social media presence.

other sites

• facebook: generally best for reaching an older audience at this stage. i don’t personally have a lot of people in my life who even still use it, but maybe you do.

• tiktok: i just don’t get the brainrot here and that’s probably okay. #booktok is a thing, albeit a thing i know nothing about.

• tumblr: man, i love tumblr. i mostly use it as a moodboard but i definitely know people who post their work there and see the return.

as always, this is just one person’s advice, and opinions you may get on this matter will probably vary greatly, as even experts use social media differently and cite different best practices. furthermore, the more granular of these best practices change regularly and are never set in stone. my practices are designed with longevity and platform growth in mind, but other strategies may work out better for other goals. and also, do what you want. i’m not the end-all-be-all of publishing strategies.

what’s next for “hard pills to swallow,” you might ask? i’d like to tackle money eventually, and the impending arrival of AWP means that my AWP essay is also imminent. i’ve also got thoughts in my mind about touring, getting an MFA, and the process of submitting to literary magazines and presses. beyond that, i want to know what y’all want to know. comment or reach out if you’ve got ideas?

this collection feels almost prophetic in hindsight. when i turned 29 at the beginning of 2025, a lot of people warned me of the upheaval that was coming for me and my life—having already radically transformed myself in many ways, i believed there could be no such thing for me. the year that has followed has been, in short, a slow process of continuous grief. 2025 was one of the hardest years of my life. april, buttersoft catalogued this in real time in a way i’m not sure any of my other writing from the year has quite done. time has felt stunted and nothing has been linear, but these poems are the closest i can get to a photograph of the feeling.

praise for april, buttersoft

“With cool, precise syntax across ten little self-discoveries, raum hands the reader a mangy bouquet, but it’s actually all on fire, and now your hair has caught, and you are both the gently burning house and the figure at the kitchen table wondering if repainting the walls will fix everything. Is there a point to rebuilding when destruction is inevitable? april, buttersoft is looking in the mirror one late night, answering.” —Stephanie Anderson, author of SOMEONE ELSE’S FEELINGS

“the ennui of stagnant rage is so familiar to me, and this collection makes me want to walk down to the beach and stare into the sea for hours. it’s gender euphoria as unearthing the unknown, making your own mythology, and a contemplative journey in conversation with their earlier works. i was speaking to someone not long ago about whether or not you can brace yourself for grief, if you can pre-grieve. the answer is front and center in this collection–you sure can try.” —Romy Rhoads Ewing, author of please stay

april, buttersoft is available for free download from Whittle Micro-Press.

last news of the year! i’ve got some things rumbling in the background for 2026, but this is officially how i am closing out 2025.

• zine club reminder: it’s zine month! this is a reminder that you can still join the i zine club i started to pull in a bit of extra income. $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3-5 zines every quarter.

• published collages: “middle of june” and “free city of novigrad” in Sage Cigarettes

• published poem: “dad says the universe smells like raspberry ketones” in Some Words

• published poem: “pov: sweater season” in Full House Literary’s The Games Room 5: below 0º

• new byline: i contributed blurbs to the News, Food & Drink, and Arts & Culture lists in the Baltimore Beat Best of 2025 issue. i’ll mail you a book if you can guess which ones are mine ;)

• new microchapbooks: my poetry micro april, buttersoft is now available for free download from Whittle Micro-Press, and my brand-new micro, totaled, is now available for free download from Artists from Maryland

• poetry book spreadsheet: i have brought back the spreadsheet i made in 2024 of upcoming poetry releases—please add your own if you’ve got them! this sheet is based on one i came across in 2023, and it was excellent for finding new reads.

notes

as the year churns to a close, i can’t help but be incredibly grateful that there is something tangible like a calendar year’s end to mark the symbolic closure of one of the worst periods of my life to date. i guess, now that i think about it, that gratitude should really be reserved for the people that helped me get through it—family and old friends and new friends alike—and the ways my creativity was also able to sustain me through some of the most difficult experiences i’ve ever had. i don’t want to throw myself a pity party, so i won’t. but i am cautiously hopeful that 2026 will have something better in store.

sneak peek

let’s have a short poem or two, eh? the first is from my chap dry stoner, which drops with Troublemaker Firestarter in February.

my coworker and i are zooted in the cannabis processing facility


and she says oh to be an edible bag on a conveyor belt
and yes, i have to agree because that relative ease
and gentle motion would be oh-so-desirable
and i microdose this later digesting tiramisu 
and riding shotgun in a sprinter van after carbonara
and i only have the one experience to go on
and nothing more but olive garden is sacred
and so is company. and so is coasting.
and in conclusion, yes, i’d love to be a bag of ginger
and pineapple gummies as it rides the belt
and tumbles gently into a crate full of all its friends
and i wonder who on earth wouldn’t.

and then here’s another shortie from you stupid slut, which will rerelease with Bullshit Lit this July. this piece previously appeared with CLOVES Literary before they went defunct.

in the interest of transparency

i’m not a good person. before i knew my body kept a calendar of its own, i made a habit of smoking a cigarette or two inside my apartment if i was really drunk, usually only if the february midnight wept ice outside my open window and i was feeling lonely because the guy i was sexting every night brought his girlfriend to my after-party. in the photos, i look just like my reflection in a vacant storefront, our shared emptiness far from all that a dusty pane of glass and i have in common.

am i opaque as plate glass when i affix my eyes to the flowered curlicues across the rug and count back one year in my memory to stealing away in someone else’s car to catonsville, two years to blacking out, and three to the same as the second but much more reckless and much less lazy? is now my chance to purge before my contact list is full of ghosts i mistake for gods and my body is full of tequila or cheap beer or pink moscato and infectious diseases? i don’t believe in prayer, but is it all right to wonder if i need it anyway?

finally, since it’s the season of giving, how about i also share one of my color study collages?

friends

• call: tomorrow (12/21) is the last day to send manuscripts to fifth wheel press for our 2027 publishing season

• release: one of my most anticipated releases of 2026, THE HUNGERING YEARS by Summer Farah, is available to preorder from Host Publicatioms

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

• tv: Southern Charm

• games: Tiny Bookshop, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Pokémon Legends: Z-A

• current playlist

reading recap

i’m not going to do a big recap of 2025, but wanted to at least share my favorite reads of the year :)

1. threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks by m. mick powell

2. The Fat Sonnets by Samantha Zighelboim

3. The Opposite of Cruelty by Steven Leyva

4. What Good Is Heaven by Raye Hendrix

5. Fat & Fire by Roseanna Alice Boswell

6. Hinting at Decolonization by Nicola Andrews

7. Toska by Alina Pleskova

8. Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola

9. The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i am still out of work and appreciate any support i’m able to get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom of the page for payment links).

for the angsty one

• specter dust ($15, Bullshit Lit, 2022): restless wraiths of the poet’s past emerge through poetry and prose.

• april, buttersoft (free, Whittle Micro-Press, 2025): as Romy Rhoads Ewing put it, “the ennui of stagnant rage is so familiar to me, and this collection makes me want to walk down to the beach and stare into the sea for hours.”

• camera indomita ($17, self-published, 2024): the poet reckons with recklessness as it relates to alcoholism, art school, and borderline personality disorder. very personal.

for your situationship

• the fine line ($10, kith books, 2022): nsfw polaroids meet teen novel erasures in this collection that asks where the line between sex and harm lies.

• salt box ($12, kith books, 2024): the poet traces longing and desire across three long, grey baltimore winters.

• the abyss is staring back ($12.50, Querencia Press, 2023): prose and poetry combine to create a portrait of queerness, disability, intimacy, and stasis.

for the one who gets all the references

• this is my stop (free, Maverick Duck Press, 2025): ten poems inspired by specific episodes of the MTV series Daria (1997–2001).

• NAT RAUM BURNS IN HELL! (free, Ghost City Press, 2023): the poetic love child of Carrie, Jennifer’s Body, and the poet’s high school experience.

• random access memory ($20, Bullshit Lit, 2023): teen novel erasures take a different narrative direction when paired with inbox/twitter centos, rewrites of high school poems, and digital collage.

for your high school best friend

• self portrait as several clusters of stars ($10, Bottlecap Press, 2023): eleven essayettes exploring the manifestation of the author’s core astrological placements.

• preparatory school for the end of the world ($10, self-published, 2021): high school horror stories wrapped in image, metaphor, and conversations between internal and external self.

• this is my stop (free, Maverick Duck Press, 2025): grab this one for the Jane to your Daria (or even the Quinn, if you get desperate).

for the one who needs to feel seen

• camera indomita ($17, self-published, 2024): the poet lays themself bare in service of one thing—self-discovery and the subsequent growth it provokes.

• this book will not save you (~$13, dogleech books, 2024): in another act of relentlessly pursuing the truth about why they are the way they are, the poet settles into an eventual understanding and appreciation of self, centered in queer joy.

• the abyss is staring back ($12.50, Querencia Press, 2023): dre levant described this hybrid poetry collection as “startling in its clarity,” and noted that “this collection navigates the human search for wholeness with an ardent and sincere voice.”

for your friend with no attention span

• april, buttersoft (free, Whittle Micro-Press, 2025): Stephanie Anderson praised these “ten little self-discoveries” by likening them to “a mangy bouquet, but it’s actually all on fire, and now your hair has caught, and you are both the gently burning house and the figure at the kitchen table wondering if repainting the walls will fix everything.”

• NAT RAUM BURNS IN HELL! (free, Ghost City Press, 2023): nine short, punchy poems make an attempt to explain, through horror, the experience of growing up and being socialized as female.

• this is my stop (free, Maverick Duck Press, 2025): another micro-collection exploring self, obligation, and insecurity through the lens of early-2000s teen angst.

for the aspiring artist

• the fine line ($10, kith books, 2022): the poet inserts their own intimate photographs into this collection of erasures to further their questioning of where pleasure ends and pain begins.

• foundwaves ($6 bundle, A Moonlit Café, 2024): a sparse ekphrastic meditation on a series of global sounds from Cities and Memory project’s sound map.

• random access memory ($20, Bullshit Lit, 2023): this full-color gem features a unique digital collage of the artist’s personal archival images on each page.

for your own mental health moment

• camera indomita ($17, self-published, 2024): this collection holds on as much as it lets go, giving the poet a new lease on life by the end of its trajectory.

• this book will not save you (~$13, dogleech books, 2024): an oft-brutal poetic account of living with borderline personality disorder and alcoholism, this collection still ends on a note of hopefulness through its celebration of queerness.

• preparatory school for the end of the world ($10, self-published, 2021): the chapbook serves as a funeral ceremony for the poet’s own ego death, unlocking a new era of self-acceptance.

for the lore collector

• specter dust ($15, Bullshit Lit, 2022): this book’s backstory draws heavily from the fictional folkloric monsters of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

• NAT RAUM BURNS IN HELL! (free, Ghost City Press, 2023): equal parts personal lore and camp horror classics, the poet tells a short but gutting story all their own.

• random access memory ($20, Bullshit Lit, 2023): the artist deep-dives into their own archive to discuss femininity, societal expectations, and memory.

for your cool aunt

• with gasoline ($10, kith books, 2025): both a poetry collection and an act of righteous trans anger, Sarah Klein declared this book “a Molotov thrown at heteropatriachy that ignites a vicious fire.”

• april, buttersoft (free, Whittle Micro-Press, 2025): each sharp, succinct poem in this collection bites back, leaving the reader with gut punch after gut punch before finally relenting, retreating back into softness.

• this book will not save you (~$13, dogleech books, 2024): Emily Perkovich called this one “a reminder that we are all in a perpetual, fluid state of morphing forms and of how those precise transmutations, the performance of just being, coexist or battle with those around us.”

parting note

if you somehow made it through this entire listicle and none of these peaked your specific interest… maybe try something else from one of these wonderful independent publishers?

• Querencia Press

• kith books

• Bullshit Lit

• Whittle Micro-Press

• BRUISER

• dogleech books

• Host Publications

• Troublemaker Firestarter

i’m very excited about the work i have coming out over the next few months—some of it is very personal to me, and all of it feels like some of the best, sharpest writing i’ve ever done. i’m also finding myself slowly re-immersed in the physical act of making things, and have been working on collages, paintings, and sewing projects at my own pace.

• zine club reminder: it’s zine month! this is a reminder that you can still join the i zine club i started to pull in a bit of extra income. $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3-5 zines every quarter, with the next mailing going out on November 30.

• published prose: “airlocked” in HAWKEYE

• published poems: “inner harbor fish kill,” “the wraith of remington,” and “until morale improves” in BRUISER

• published poem: “all night i hear the noise of fire licking” in Stone Circle Review

• published poem: “crash course in carpal tunnel” in Cosmic Daffodil’s The Body Archive

• published poem: “the specter of station north” in MEMEZINE’s Girlhood is a spectrum issue

• published poem: “sober sunday” in Maudlin House

• published poems: “better off dead” and “for all the times i’ve said ‘it’s the little things’” in Jarnal Issue 4

• award nominations: my collaborative work with D.W. Baker, “air,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Genrepunk Magazine. my piece “journal (take #45)” was also nominated by beestung for both Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions.

• new microchapbook: my poetry micro april, buttersoft is now available for free download from Whittle Micro-Press

notes + sneak peek

i’m transparently feeling the cumulative effect of this year on my physical and mental health. this is making it hard for me to focus on creating, as my focus recently has been self-care. as such, i don’t have a sneak peek of anything this month, but stay tuned for a look inside my 2026 publications next month.

workshop reminders + other events

• The Randomizer. December 14 @ 12PM EST.

• Scene/Setting: Writing Place. December 18 @ 7PM EST.

  • you can choose to donate for just the prompts/instructions.

  • descriptions of all workshops can be found at natraum.com/workshops.

• other events: i’m reading at Jarnal’s fourth issue launch party (11/22, 6PM @ Ottobar Upstairs) and again as part of Dodo Eraser’s inaugural reading (11/26, 7PM CST, virtual/contact for link)

friends

• call: my pals at JAKE have reopened for rolling general submissions after a short hiatus

• release: i recently picked up BODY MEMORY by Meriweather Clarke, out now with Unsolicited Press

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES by Eva Alter, Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola, Persistence by Ann Eichler Kolakowski, GOOD MORNING AMERICA I AM HUNGRY AND ON FIRE by jamie mortara, SOMEONE ELSE’S FEELINGS by stephanie anderson, Sympathy for the Son by Jaiden Thompson, BURIED LOVE IN ARCHIVED WEBSITES by Aldrin Badiola, THIS PLACE IS COVERED HEAD TO TOE IN SHIT by Julián Martinez

• tv: The Great British Baking Show, The Circle

• games: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i am still out of work and appreciate any support i’m able to get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom for payment links).

this also is your last call for gig work in the following areas: web design; print and publication design; social media graphics and reels; production, developmental, and copy editing; portrait photography; consulting. i’ll be closing my books at the end of the year—reach out soon via my contact page if you’re interested in working together.

well, my first hard pill to swallow is: no. we’re actually not all just trying to make it. some of us do this because writing (and creating) is a natural aspect of our lives, one that fills a big, otherwise-unfillable void within ourselves. some of us do this to form communities, which was actually the most popular response to “why do you submit your work to literary magazines?” when i conducted a community study on submitting work for my Electronic Publishing students this fall (“to keep myself writing” was second). and some of us do this to make money, which… isn’t for the faint of heart. we’ll get to that.

i am writing this essay because recently, the idea of whether or not you need a literary agent has once again cycled back around to being literary Twitter’s1 discourse du jour. some suggest that it’s a waste of time; others view it as necessary if you want to reach people with your book, and that independent presses who accept submissions from those other than agents are great, but their size may limit the reach of the book.

it’s here i feel obligated to say: i am a multiply-published author, an independent publisher, and a writer who does this fiercely because there is no other way for me. i don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of the true “traditional publishing” (tradpub) landscape2 because i have professionally eschewed it almost entirely, first by happenstance and then by design. i am not a hater of those who publish with large publishing houses, but in all honesty, that was never going to be me.

i also feel compelled to state that i responded to this initial discourse by reposting the follow-up of the person who started it, who, when asked how to reach large audiences without an agent, said he did not give a shit about doing so, and that this was the secret. on the surface, i have to be honest that this is my personal stance. it is my belief that equating “writing” with “publishing” is a slippery slope to requiring external validation to continue making work (and believing in said work); in my experience, this is often a toxic creative model, as it also causes one to devalue their work if it does not receive the attention its creator is hoping for.

i later responded to a friend on my TL, who said it was okay for wanting people to read your work to be a goal, as long as it was not the goal. on a broad level, i do also agree with this. despite not explicitly seeking it myself, i don’t think that wanting people to read and connect with your creative work is ever a bad thing. my concerns with seeking to be read by “a meaningful number of readers” stem mostly from the ways in which a) as established, it’s really easy to get caught in a feedback loop with yourself when you are deliberately seeking an audience; b) folks equate small presses to a small amount of reach and big presses to large readerships and (sometimes) more money; and c) the process of selling books is largely author-driven, even in many tradpub settings. furthermore, what number constitutes a “meaningful” readership varies widely—it’s enough for some to connect with a smaller group of people who really engage with the work, but others want to be seen in the thousands.

speaking a bit more to point c (and even to b, a bit), i noted in this conversation with my friend that ultimately, you always get out of a book what you put into it. as an indie publisher, the books that have the most marketing engagement from their authors are usually going to sell the most copies. this is true of any book release—the difference is that bigger publishers often have this baked into their contracts, or require an author-created marketing plan as part of the submission process. the author is generally expected to engage in a certain amount of publicity for a book to have any shot at a long life cycle. very rarely can you just drop a book and expect your publisher to do all the work.3

and now, we get to the actual heart of why i’m writing this: i realized during this conversation that although i’m nowhere near even influencer numbers, i have managed to find somewhat of a consistent readership for my work. this has come largely through genuine efforts at community engagement, as well as partly through running my own publishing project and networking with the many incredible queer writers and artists i’ve been able to work with there. but i also do have a background in social media, and do marketing for a living, and i don’t discount this as an advantage that i have when i’m getting ready to drop a new book.

flexes incoming, if only to bolster all that i am about to say in this essay: i have also published (sometimes even distributed) 33 titles in my career as an author/creator of my own books.4 now, the first several were small-edition, self-published books, so let’s count only books that have undergone an editorial process of some sort: 22, all of which were published independently. i don’t have a lifetime number on book sales, but i know i have made upwards of $1000 on my “publishing career” as a whole (including litmag payments and contest winnings), which is nothing to sneeze at, either. i have work in all genres5 (including visual art) published or forthcoming in almost 200 literary magazines. i do all of this by sending roughly 400 journal, contest, and manuscript submissions in a calendar year. all of this is to say that i’m not an expert, but i think i have at least earned the right to write a rant-y substack essay about how to effectively reach people with your work. yes: this is (basically) an essay on how to sell books without selling out.

first thing’s first: get comfortable with rejection. i’m speaking as an editor when i say that unless you have done something incredibly heinous, a rejection is literally never about you as a person. yes, we are not able to separate the art from the artist, but that’s also not usually how an editorial process works. you don’t get into a litmag because you kiss up to the editors in your cover letter; you get in because the editors took a liking to your work. sometimes this means getting rejected and trying again. a rejection is not a “never” unless it explicitly says so—it’s usually a “not right now, not this piece.”

which, yeah, at the beginning of your career, can feel heartbreaking. i remember feeling dejected as hell in 2016 because a gallery in Budapest i no longer remember the name of didn’t want my work about intimacy when that was all i was making work about; to me, it was my obsession, and i didn’t understand how no one could have seen that. i heard my professors and mentors in my head, telling me this was a normal part of the process, but it was a while before i truly internalized the idea that no submission practice is complete without rejection. although i’m now against using metrics to quantify my own submissions practice, i had previously heard from a fine art photographer (with a substantial CV) that a 10% acceptance rate in a given year is still a great rate of success.

the year i internalized this advice was not the year i beat that number, but the year that i started getting accepted with any regularity at all. a rejection now elicits a variety of responses from me: a sigh, an eye-roll, and yes, occasionally, a pang of disappointment. i’m not going to say i’m immune to rejections, but i have accepted them (no pun intended) as part of the ecosystem in which i am working. i also want to say i have not accomplished this by reading heavily into the wording of rejections to figure out if an editor really wants to read more—i treat every rejection as the same response: “not right now.”

on that note, persistence is sometimes key. i often see people in online literary communities asking how many rejections one should receive from a specific publisher before throwing in the towel. my honest answer is that unless the vibe drastically shifts in a way that makes me no longer want to submit to that place, i have never given up on a magazine that i really wanted to see my work in. i was rejected by Poetry Online over 40 times before they accepted one of my poems. sometimes it really is like the adage of falling down 7 times, standing up 8. the editorial process is extremely subjective, and often much more about the way a particular issue or publishing season coalesces together than the specific pieces themselves. and on that note, it’s absolutely my opinion that someone who is serious about publishing work should consider taking a reader position at a literary magazine at some point, even if it’s only temporary. no one ever truly understands the editorial process, but seeing inside of it can demystify a whole lot.

i also don’t want to discount the importance of publishing individual pieces in promoting a book as a whole. this does a lot for your potential readership once the book does come out: it introduces people to your style, sensibilities, and themes of choice. in the cases of a collection, it can sometimes give readers a sample of what’s to come if they buy the book. it can sometimes get you in touch with editors who might be inclined to promote the book within their publication’s network. and for publishers who do consider an author’s “whole package”—that is to say, the platform they have built and any past engagement they may have done within their field—this can sometimes make the idea of working with a person look more desirable.6

this brings me to social media. i once got very good advice from a professor and fellow indie publisher: if you wait until you have a book coming out to get on social media about your work, you’re too late; it comes off as disingenuous at best, and you’re also missing the additional engagement you could have generated in the time leading up to that announcement by building your network. sorry if this comes across as pessimistic—it’s also pretty overwhelmingly the case. if you want to (or even just have to) use social media to promote your book later, start now. hate social media? build a website. start an email newsletter. do something to engage online with the potential community of people who want to read your work; when you have something book-sized to give them, they’ll devour it.

social media itself is a fluid thing, and is becoming more so, especially speaking as a professional with a day job in the field. algorithms are becoming more biased, largely in part due to fascist leadership appealing greatly to the sensibilities of the world’s billionaires, but that’s another essay. what you can do is try, and i don’t just mean by making content about writing and publishing. i personally don’t enjoy following writers who only post about writing7—it’s okay to separate yourself from your work in some ways if it’s necessary, especially for safety reasons, but don’t be afraid to showcase your personality or other interests, either. if you don’t want to get super personal, maybe this looks like what you’re reading lately, or a cool article about an author you enjoy. if you’re going the website/newsletter route, pepper in a bit of yourself. the point is that you try something.8

the next question i see around the web not irregularly is about book reviews and what they actually do for sales. answers here vary: some publishers say it doesn’t make a difference in sales if a book gets reviewed, whereas others see all forms of publicity as doing something for the overall visibility of the book. i tend to fall into the latter camp as a publisher—transparently, no, we do not see a sharp increase in sales the moment one of our books is reviewed, but i do believe that having reviews of our books placed in reputable outlets has bolstered the overall reputation of the press. in that way, to use another adage, a rising tide does lift all boats.

as an indie publisher, one author’s book being received well puts our name in the minds of folks, especially potential submitters. this inevitably leads to us receiving an increasingly excellent crop of submissions each time we hold an open reading period, making it (unfortunately) more competitive, but this increase in quality also continues to raise the proverbial bar, which sets a standard over time of what a press is looking for. what that really means is that your press-mates are also part of your success and vice versa, because again: rising tide, all boats. and all of this is to say that the best way to find a publisher that fits you is to read books from the places you want to publish you. you’ll figure out if these are the books you wish to be part of the same canon as, and you’ll also support the press in the meantime.

this isn’t to say it’s all about who you and your publisher know,9 but rather, that a publishing relationship should be mutually beneficial. your publisher is relying on you just as much as you are relying on them, and this is why i personally view the editorial process as an extreme collaboration. not all publishing houses operate this way, but it’s generally a check mark in the column of indie lit—which is getting harder to define but is generally hallmarked by smaller overhead costs, no massive corporate funding, and smaller, mostly-volunteer staffs. these publishers usually operate out of a love for the game, and are becoming increasingly adept at using grassroots and organic marketing efforts to get books into the hands of readers. what’s more, you are more likely to retain a high level of creative control over the finished product.

there is such a demand for this specific publishing ecosystem that distributors have been founded just for smaller presses, such as Asterism, Itasca, and the now-defunct10 Small Press Distribution. what that really means is that if your goal is truly to get books into the hands of many people, you’re going to want to look for a publisher with a similar distribution agreement in place. some small presses also work with IngramSpark either instead of or in tandem with other distributors. either way, the key word and question for you is distribution and what that looks like. now, if your goal is just to have a published book out in the world, and anyone who reads it is a potential bonus? distribution may not be as important—unless you want to place your book in stores.

i strongly feel that no one ever talks about the practicalities of trying to get bookstores to stock your books, either as an author or as a publisher. the fact of the matter is that it also varies widely—some stores will buy anything, especially if it’s from a local author. other stores are a lot harder to get a foot in the door with, even if you are a local author.11 and those stores usually have harder, faster rules about what they are willing to stock; this sometimes includes things like a book having a spine with text on it, an ISBN, a “proper” distributor that isn’t just the publisher or Amazon KDP. some stores work strictly with IngramSpark purchasing, whereas others are willing to shop with other distributors or even wholesale or consign the book directly from the publisher or author. it really depends, and there’s not an easy way to figure out which stores are willing to do what beyond doing research, including sending inquiries to ask when the information isn’t readily available. nothing like good old copy-paste cold emailing, am i right?

this also doesn’t generally include major booksellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org, who are generally only willing to stock books sold through major commercial distributors like IngramSpark.12 the other caveat to IngramSpark distribution that no one talks about is that your book has to be listed on these major booksellers’ sites in order to opt into using their distribution services at all—great news if you want your book on Amazon, but not so amazing if you, like me, are trying to get your buyers to purchase it literally anywhere else. and newsflash: you should probably be like me, because while Amazon does provide unprecedented theoretical visibility for your title in its marketplace, they also insist upon buying the book at a deeply discounted wholesale rate and marking it down so that the publisher (and in turn, the author) earn almost nothing on the sale.

another note regarding booksellers is that returns are a real thing that happens. bookstores return purchased books to distributors (and in turn, presses) all the time. people buy books on amazon and then return them when they finish reading. these are just a few examples, and ultimately, someone has to eat that cost somewhere; sometimes it’s the press, sometimes it’s the author. every press handles it differently.

one final thought on bookstores: it’s great to place your books in a brick and mortar and even an online store, but it is far from the only way you will sell books. unless they have substantial reason to believe you will bring in a large chunk of sales (such as author events), most stores will only stock a few copies at a time, with the exception of major sellers linked with print-on-demand distributors such as IngramSpark.

author events, by the way, are a massive way to sell books. i have personally never seen the kind of book sales i saw when i went on tour, even with my debut chapbook. turns out there’s no substitute for reading your work in front of a room full of people and then engaging with them. i sold books at even my more sparsely-attended events, which brings me to my first point about doing events: sometimes, no matter what you do, people will not show up.

and i have to sidebar here for a moment, because that’s a core part of this, too: part of publishing a book means, on some level, being okay with people not buying it. you can want them to buy it, and you should. but ultimately, your career as an author is not measurable in book sales, and also, let’s be real for a second: when you started this, you had a creative dream that started with a story or a poem or a concept. that dream is not inherently lesser in value if 5 people buy the book or 75 people buy the book or 500 people buy it—unless you ask a capitalist, or a publisher deeply beholden to capitalism, in which case, yeah, they’re going to tell you “absolutely your career is measurable in sales.” it’s fair to want to reach an audience, and fair to be disappointed when you may not have as much reach as you want, but staking your entire worth on selling books is a fruitless game. i’m speaking as an author, a publisher, and a human person when i say this.

this also goes back to what i mean when i say that smaller presses don’t always equate to smaller reach. a small press book could sell hundreds of copies, and in many cases, they have—just ask Stanchion author Hannah Grieco or Discount Guillotine author Temperance Aghamohammadi, whose books have both broken press records for sales. conversely, a Big 5 book could stagnate, only sell as many copies in its lifetime. it’s statistically less likely given the reach of Big 5 publishers compared to most indie outlets, but is still within the realm of possibility. i’ll even give credit to a writer i have mutually blocked on Twitter, who added to the discourse that spurred this essay by pointing out that a lot of Big 5 books are also picked up on a whim by a more casual reader, sometimes donated before even being read. this suggests something we all already knew, as lifelong readers with eyes bigger than schedules—a purchase doesn’t even always equate to a read.

so as for how to get people to read your books, it goes back to engaging with an audience. a big way to do this, especially if you hate being online, is by doing author events. it’s generally not hard to pull together something local with enough notice; folks in larger cities can probably pull off more than one, depending on the format of the event. and there are a lot of ways to approach an event—for example, you could choose to book a space and curate your own event, or join an existing reading series or open mic. both have benefits and drawbacks, speaking as both a reader and a booker. creating your own event ultimately requires more effort and comes with less of a guarantee to draw a large audience, but allows a level of creative control13 that latching onto someone else’s event might not afford. on the other hand, an established event like a reading series is likely to cast a wider net, meaning the crowd is generally a bit bigger. if you do this, remember that not everyone is there to hear about your book; be respectful to the host of the event and don’t make it all about you.

back on the subject of touring, the unfortunate reality is that no one gets paid to tour unless they are famous-famous. even Big 5 publishers do not generally pay for author-conducted marketing activities, which absolutely includes going on tour. for this reason, a lot of authors don’t get to do events outside their immediate area. when i toured, i chose to mostly book my own events, and i was able to at least make the travel costs back in book sales about half the time. i traveled almost entirely by train (local commuter rail and Amtrak) and stayed almost entirely with friends.14 i completed the entire tour (Baltimore, D.C., Philly, NYC, Boston, Columbia, and Baltimore again) in two and a half months, with an auxiliary unofficial stop in Chicago a month after the fact.

i also think it’s worth noting that the best-attended event that i curated was a local event in Baltimore, and that’s also the event at which i sold the most copies of my book. i don’t regret touring, and would do it again, but would absolutely do a few things differently, as it ultimately took a lot out of me physically and emotionally. i would definitely spread my events out more, and in cities where i have a smaller network, i think it would be worth it to forgo planning my own event and try to find a series. this also doesn’t discount the ability of other readers to draw their own audiences, though—i invited a number of my friends and peers to read with me on tour, and each city did in fact have its own unique vibe.

a final topic of discussion for book tours is whether or not to include virtual events. i do think this is a great way to engage a wider portion of your dedicated audience, as well as potentially that of others if you invite other readers, but i have personally never seen a substantial lift in book sales from a virtual-only event. a zoom reading is great for a number of reasons, but sales is not one of them.

as i previously mentioned, touring (and most marketing) expenses are often the responsibility of the author.15 this and my feeling that part of writing a book is reconciling the thought of low sales are a corollary to my next point, which is that many people who publish books don’t make a ton of money off of it. again, many independent publishers are in it for the love of the game, as are many authors. it is absolutely possible to make money on even a “small” indie release, but doing so decidedly involves engaging in at least some form of marketing strategy.

as a press owner who works in marketing by day, i like to think i do this fairly robustly—i market our titles on social media, i distribute with Asterism and cross-list books on their online storefront, i maintain a network of independent reviewers and bookstore contacts, among other efforts. even with all of this, some of our books don’t see the numbers they could, usually in cases where the author doesn’t have an online presence or do events.

and even with all this strategy, the amount of money you actually make off the book depends on your publishing contract. yet again, here comes something all publishers do differently: some offer an advance with a percentage of royalties paid out after the advance amount is reached. some offer an escalating royalty rate, which is to say that the rate increases after a certain amount of sales. some offer straight-up profit sharing with a specific percentage split of each sale’s profit (n.b. as a publisher, this is what i do, as i find it to be the most straightforward). some publishers accumulate profits and only pay out if they’re above a certain threshold. some publishers pay nothing until the cost of a printed edition is recouped, then share all profits with the author. and some publishers just pay a lump sump, one-time payment per edition/print fun in lieu of ongoing bookkeeping. the point, again, is that it really depends.

i have never seen a Big 5 publishing contract with my own eyes, but the insight i have gained from friends who have is that indie publishers do typically offer a more competitive royalty/profit share percentage, or at least an otherwise-comparable way of compensating authors, such as manuscript contest cash prizes. this does often conversely come with the absence of things like advances (though still possible with larger indies), which can be substantial in Big 5 settings.

way back at the top of this essay, i mentioned that i’ve published 22 books that have seen some sort of editorial process—all but one of these was published with an independent press.16 i haven’t kept detailed records on what i’ve earned on most of these books, but i definitely have not seen more than $400 in profits/payments for… well, anything i’ve written, ever, but also any of my books. i say all of this because i think there is not nearly enough transparency with regards to this side of publishing. my experience here is not unilateral, but the existence of these profits at all is also decidedly influenced by the fact that i do a lot of in-person events, including AWP.17 these numbers also largely diminished after my first few books, despite any marketing efforts on my or my publisher’s parts, and only returned to that same level of sales when i started touring.

hey, nat, your post is almost too long for gmail to read it properly. thanks substack! i’d like to start landing my plane by briefly talking about the power of just being a good person. being a kind part of your local (and online) ecosystems goes a long way. as my favorite fictional character of all time, Geralt of Rivia, says, an honorable person usually has friends and colleagues with similar virtues. a rogue can only count on other rogues. surround yourself with the kind of community you want to be a part of.

in other parting advice: sometimes you have to send cold emails, and you shouldn’t ever expect anything to come from them; just be cool when it does. tap your network, but do it appropriately, and always be willing to return the favor if someone else needs it—when i say it’s about who you know, this is what i mean. it’s not the size of the press, but how they use it, and whether that use aligns with what you (yes, you, and no one else) want to get out of publishing a book. if you build it, they will eventually come, and this is true of everything from your platform to the book itself. finally, trust your gut if something feels off—as one of my best friends would say, none of this is actually that serious, and no contract is worth compromising your values.

why am i writing this? well, first, i believe in transparency, even if it’s just one person spouting a bunch of thoughts like i just did. but i also care about the independent publishing landscape and want to see it succeed. so, to conclude by briefly alluding to what ignited this essay spark for me, i’d like to remind people that the number one way to ensure that a smaller press or an indie author reaches a wider audience is to make a habit of buying, sharing, reading, and reviewing their books alongside bigger releases.

a reminder: this is an opinion essay. i am one person. that person also has feelings, despite being mostly numbed to rejection. that person also also has pursuits, which you can follow and learn more about on this very substack (it is always free, but i don’t have a job right now (if that wasn’t obvious already) and any paid subs/tips help a lot).

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quieter month for me in terms of publications, but i still feel more in touch with my creative self than ever, maybe. i recently did a bookmaking workshop at The House Handcrafted that brought me back to my book arts roots and made me feel more passionate about physically making things more often. so maybe this is a promise to start doing that?

• zine club reminder: i started a zine club to pull in a bit of extra income! $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3-5 zines every quarter. i can’t believe it’s almost time for my second mailer—stay tuned.

• published prose: “flesh wounds” in Waffle Fried Issue 2

• published poem: “the feminine urge” in the engine)idling Issue 7: The Urge

• award nominations: apparently i’m not still done with Best of the Net nominations yet, because i picked up a humbling, staggering five more nods from Silly Goose Press, ballast, Spark to Flame, Croak, and Identity Theory for my pieces “my gender is jaywalking in stilettos,” “to a home on god’s celestial shore,” “fire” (collab with D.W. Baker), “skinbreather,” and “a chainsaw whirrs through february air” respectively!

notes

i’ve been working on and off on a few prose projects with the hopes of finishing my novella by the end of the month. it’s been interesting to shift back into that gear, as i feel like i really have to be in a mood to write good prose. it’s also frankly been a nice break from all the processing i have been doing. life has thrown some big shifts at me this year and i’m equal parts bitter and hopeful, but trying to lean into the latter. here’s hoping it all goes down okay in the end.

sneak peek

since losing my job, i’ve been hosting virtual workshops to raise a bit of money for living expenses, etc. i’ve got a schedule of dates you can sign up for, and a slide/prompt from my pop culture workshop to entice you into buying a ticket for one of these.

schedule + info

• It’s Lit: Literary Magazine Submissions. October 29 @ 7pm EST.

• The Randomizer. November 6 @ 7pm EST.

• No Choice But to Stan: Writing Pop Culture in Poetry. November 15 @ 12pm EST.

• Writing to Grieve: Poetry as Processing. November 22 @ 12pm EST.

• The Randomizer will run again in late November/early December if you can’t make it. I’ll also be running a workshop on writing place/setting.

• You can choose to donate for just the prompts/instructions.

• Descriptions of all workshops can be found at natraum.com/workshops.

friends

• call: Troublemaker Firestarter’s 10th volume, fairweather, is open for submissions until 12/15

• release: Dreams for Earth by Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi is out now with Deep Vellum

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: Toska by Alina Pleskova, please stay by Romy Rhoads Ewing, Milk Sickness by David Greenspan, D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S by stevie redwood

• tv: Love Island Games, Project Runway, The Great British Baking Show, The Circle

• games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Stardew Valley

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i recently lost my day job and am scrambling for extra income. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom for payment links).

on that note, i am still open to gig work in the following areas: web design; print and publication design; social media graphics and reels; production, developmental, and copy editing; portrait photography; consulting. reach out via my contact page if you’re interested in working together.

• zine club reminder: i started a zine club to pull in a bit of extra income! $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3-5 zines every quarter. august’s mailers are making their way out into the world, and i am already scheming for november…

• published prose: “ghosts” in Redamancy Magazine

• published piece: “air” in Genrepunk Magazine (collab with D.W. Baker)

• published poem: “poem in which you become the ‘you’” in HAD

• published poem: “ex solo” in t’Art’s Between Queer Teeth anthology

• award nominations: i’ve received three more nominations for the 2026 Best of the Net anthology from underscore_magazine, Garden Party Collective, and Artists From Maryland for my poem “mourning”, my piece “journal (take #21),” and my untitled photograph at the American Visionary Arts Museum, respectively. “mourning” also got a nod for the Genrepunk Awards in the Haunting category!

notes

in actual news, i am adjuncting again this fall, this time teaching electronic publishing in my old grad program. among other things, this means i will be on the lookout for submission calls to pass on to my students in the near future! a major goal of mine as an educator is to model the professional development-focused approach i received in undergrad and demystify the often complicated act of being a creative professional. and as usual, i am practicing what i preach by continuing a cavalcade of accolades (i really said it for the rhyme, not the flex).

sneak peek

this poem was written a few autumns ago, was first published by paper teeth press, and is forthcoming in my collection fruits of the valley (Querencia Press, 2026).

after mabon
After Stardew Valley


my want to disappear to a cottage
on a mountain riverbank is brought to you
by the smell of freshly cut grass
and a secret love for yarn-speckled white
carpet. october is déjà vu weather,
rumours (specifically “dreams”) weather,
petunias wilting in mom’s antique church
planters & an olive sapling stretching all
its gangly limbs westward for the afternoon
sun. four o’clock’s jaune d’or mixes 
with carpet of crunched canary poplar
leaves laid over the lawn. i still prefer fall
in Pelican Town, with only forest-spirit voices
for company and not october’s ghosts
whispering let the bodies keep the score as i sway
to seventies guitar riffs in the kind
of breeze i used to daydream about.

friends

• call: Welter remains open for online journal submissions on the theme of “Before / After” until 9/30 or the submission cap is reached

• release: Finnegan Shepard’s novella Trans, a love story is out now with akinoga press

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: Tranz by Spencer Williams, Yes I’m Changing by Brianna Coleman, Phases by Tramaine Suubi

• tv: Are You My First?

• games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i recently lost my day job and am scrambling for extra income. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom for payment links).

on that note, i am opening myself up for limited gig work in the following areas: web design; print and publication design; social media graphics and reels; production, developmental, and copy editing; portrait photography; consulting. reach out via my contact page if you’re interested.

i’ve become more passionate about making my smallest collections free to download over the years, and i always love to find a publisher that shares the same ethos. check out the other free micros that MDP offers!

selected works

• “i will never” in wishful thinking press

• “i think they left the box” in discount guillotine Issue #1

this is my stop is available for free download from Maverick Duck Press.

• zine club reminder: i started a zine club to pull in a bit of extra income! $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3-5 zines every quarter. i am a bit behind on mailing the first batch because of some major life changes, but plan to do so by the end of this month!

• published essay: “On the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words” in Sage Cigarettes

• published poem: “pastoral on cymbalta” in Dishsoap Quarterly

• published piece: “libations” in MENACE Issue 1

• published prose: “roaches” in Lunchbreak Review

• published poem: “instagram user @mienfoofighters was onto something” in stony run

• published poem: “self-portrait as baltimore” in Stanchion Issue 19

• published poem: “if bpd could talk” in manyworlds.place Issue 9

• botn finalist: my poem “a photo bro asked me a patronizing question in 2016 and i am still thinking about it” (orig. pubbed in Split Lip Magazine) was a Best of the Net 2025 finalist!

• botn nomination: i’ve received a nomination for the 2026 Best of the Net anthology from petrichor, for my piece “journal (take #27)” (and a few other nods i cannot talk about yet…)

notes

i’ve written about this in the kinds of poems that stay locked away forever, but when i turned 29 earlier this year, my boss told me good luck. turns out i needed it—this year so far has tested me in some of the most brutal ways i could have imagined, and even a few i could not have imagined. it’s taught me who my friends are, who really supports me, and who doesn’t have my back at the end of the day. still, i finally feel like the ball is starting to roll downhill instead of this sisyphean struggle i have been caught in for months now. to those who have been there for me, especially over the course of the last month or so, i deeply appreciate this. my door is always open for you.

sneak peek

behold, some photographs i’ve taken this summer and am very proud of!

friends

• call: underscore_magazine reopens for city-themed submissions on 9/1

• release: fifth wheel press’ last single-author collection until 2027, in the aftermath by Jessica Nirvana Ram, is now available for preorder

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• books: Home Theater by Rosanne Singer, a note that will shatter the way things are by sterling-elizabeth arcadia, Phantasmagossip by Sara Mae

• tv: Love Island: Beyond the Villa

• games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• current playlist

the part where i ask for money

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i’m frankly in a place where i could use any additional income i can get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom for payment links).

this really started last month, but i’m starting to see the pieces i wrote during my short prose phase come out into the world. i’m dipping into that space more, but i’m sure i’ll also have more to share later down the line, so let’s get to the news.

• first, zine club: i started a zine club to pull in a bit of extra income! $2 per month ($6 quarterly) gets you 3-5 zines every quarter, with the first mailing going out at the end of this month.

• published prose: “red eyes” in The Q&A Queerzine Issue 7

• published prose: “breaking down” in Resurrection Magazine Issue IV: <BE(numb)ED>

• published poem: “poem for myself, for i will never do anything for a transphobe” in Queerlings Issue 9

• published poems: “poem as instructions for survival” and “poem after a student at my university got on the mic at graduation and said trans people didn’t exist” in Boudin

• published prose: “recovering” and “scarfacing” in Troublemaker Firestarter Volume 9

• published poem: “every year since 2016 has been a year of realizing stuff” in Dog Teeth Issue 4: CAVE CANEM

• published poem: “poem for drinking down that gin and kerosene” in Moist Poetry Journal’s Summer Riot series

notes

moving a little slower lately as i am orbited by my numerous responsibilities. a lot of people recently have told me i need to do less, and for once, i am finding myself agreeing with them. this will be the case as i make 2026 the year of sustainable growth for both my practice and my press. i feel myself falling down on important things—my goal is to create systems in which this no longer happens. if i owe you something, know that i am working on it.

sneak peek

i’m pleased to announce that Whittle Micro-Press has acquired my microchapbook, april, buttersoft. here’s a poem from the book, which will release for digital download in november.

consider

love as a prerequisite
for lust, as a lubricant
to saturate the shades
of grey which make up
the parts of me that still
want. how long a fire
can sustain itself when
there is still oxygen
to flow through its coals.
how eventually, left
unattended, those very
same coals will expire.

friends

• call: fifth wheel press is open for unthemed blog submissions until 8/15

• release: one of my favorite poets, m. mick powell, is releasing her debut full-length collection Dead Girl Cameo next month

current events

here’s what i’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and playing.

• tv: Love Island USA, Love Island: Beyond the Villa

• games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

• current playlist

shameless plug

i have reopened paid subscriptions. while the pool will always be 100% free, i’m frankly in a place where i could use any additional income i can get right now. if you’d prefer not to ferry your money through substack (i get it), you can also set up a recurring donation on ko-fi or send me a tip (scroll to the bottom for payment links).