August 14, 2025
Baltimore Review News: The journal wrapped up a set of meetings—Zoom office hours—tonight, discussing the usual business/administrative items and taking some time to read poetry submissions together. We read some new submissions before taking a look at poems that had received at least a couple of Yes votes. Some editors were present who focused almost exclusively on prose submissions, but they were talked into weighing in on these poems. I think it's a good exercise for all of us to read across genres sometimes; I value the input of editors reading out of their comfort zones—and I don’t like to think that poetry is only for poets. (That’s actually a pretty distressing thought.) A good meeting tonight, and we ended the night with a poem that we all—miraculously—agreed should be published. Consensus is not always easy to come by. And sometimes, even when the poetry readers all vote Yes, they don’t agree on which of the three poems to publish. So—one poem to accept tomorrow.
We recently decided to have a special micros section in the fall issue. The submission period will be September 1 – 14, with all decisions made by September 30. Keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll get some stunning micros of 400 words max. Posted to social media about this.
Baltimore Review 2025, the print compilation of work published in the summer and fall 2024 and winter and spring 2025 issues, will be sent to the contributors very soon. The print on some of the pages looked lighter to me. Maybe the copy I got was a one-off. If the copy I get from Amazon tomorrow has the same issue with the same pages, I’ll fool around with some formatting and re-submit. Not anticipating any other problems. Fingers crossed.
On a personal note: My own work hangs in In-Progress and Received Submittable limbo, with a few works submitted to systems other than Submittable. I know that I have to stop checking the status and get back to the work (and joy) of writing. If I don’t schedule a time for writing, it’s not going to happen. Well, maybe it will happen eventually, but not enough to satisfy me. If I can note days to water the plants on my calendar, surely I can do this for writing—right?