Effing the Ineffable #1: Submitting work, flakiness, & cultivating creativity

An occasional poetry round-up

Ginger Ayla
4 min readApr 14, 2023
Photo by Ai Takeda on Unsplash

Update: Hi Reader! I’m now publishing new essays, writing prompts, and updated lists of poetry publishing opportunities on my Substack, Effing the Ineffable. Subscribe for free!

I spent some time on poetry submissions yesterday. I’ve switched my strategy this year from mostly-contests to mostly-open-calls. I don’t care about winning anything, I just want my poems to leave the nest and find homes in the admittedly bizarre-o literary world of today.

In other news, I committed to the 100-Day Project this year only to drop off after a month again. I don’t regret quitting early; I decided to focus instead on assistant-teaching The Poetry Lab’s spring cohort of The Feedback Circle. The idea of becoming a teaching artist is exciting to me, and I have to go where I’m jolted.

But sometimes I wonder if I make breakable commitments just so that I have something low-stakes I can give myself a reprieve from. Is this all some needlessly complex way to show myself I still care about me? I think mostly, though, it’s my ADHD.

Also contributing to my occasional flakiness, I like the idea of challenging myself so much I forget that I already work a full-time job, volunteer as…

--

--

Ginger Ayla

Writer, poet, and aspiring teaching artist living on the Colorado/New Mexico border. Author of Effing the Ineffable on Substack: gingerayla.substack.com.