Michael Getty

Issue #1 About Me, The Author Parts of my story are pretty common. Sensitive, artsy queer kid raised in a hostile world. I figured out I wanted to be a writer in fifth grade, when my school hosted an author who talked about her books. I couldn't tell you who she was, but I tried to send her a letter with book ideas of my own. This was the seventies, and divorce was still pretty uncommon. A classmate of mine had announced her parents were divorcing. There were actual gasps. So my writing...

I'm listening to Natalie Goldberg read her classic, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. I love it for the light it sheds on the emotional side of writing. The audiobook version has an off-the-cuff afterword on each chapter, which is amazing. At one point, she reflects on writers who publish books and don't understand when they don't take off. Her advice? Be patient. Write another book. That's what practice is. You do writing practice, then you practice a book. Book after book...

I've noticed that of the dozen or so of my poems and short fiction pieces that appeared online, a bunch have gone dark as journals have folded. Heaven knows what the mortality rate of independent online literary journals is. It was so wonderful of them to publish our stuff. Here are two poems that appeared in Open Minds Quarterly and Grim and Gilded, respectively A lot of my poetry centres on Jewish themes. Here's a sample that appeared once in Poetica. "We Take On" (The Aleinu) We Take OnThe...