Welcome!

January 2025

Author

Jeremy Reed
January 13, 2025

Hello!

And welcome to my first newsletter! It’s the first day of the spring semester, and the first day of a semester always feels like it brings with it a lot of new beginnings. Glad to have you here for the beginning of this letter writing.

Some Things About Me to Get Us Started

  • I’m a poet and writer, teacher, editor and reader, among a lot of other things

  • This newsletter will be about me and what I’m up to, for those who want to stay in touch or those who are curious about the same things I am, including what I’m reading, teaching, thinking about, befuddled by, writing, questioning, researching, or, most likely, all of the above

  • I typically read a handful of books at a time, hopping back and forth between them, unless I’m working on a specific project

  • I don’t know that there’s a better, more grounded feeling for me than being in the middle of writing, mind turned off except for its focus just there, on one word or line or sentence, then the next, and the next

  • Way back, I wrote on the early versions of LiveJournal and Tumblr and I can already tell that’s influencing how I see this space

  • If you didn’t know, I’m also a dad to a toddler

  • I am always reminding myself of the feeling I get when I am writing as a way to get myself back to that practice

  • I read a lot of different things, but it’s typically poetry, literary fiction and nonfiction, craft or pedagogy books, and, more recently, graphic novels/memoir

  • I write a lot of different things too, mostly poetry but also essays, fiction, craft/teaching things, scholarly stuff, all the in-between

  • I’m someone who writes more than I think I do, only realizing later that the little notes and thoughts to myself have accumulated into something bigger than I knew I was making

  • Writing to you is already such a nice thing

A New Publication

Text of poem reads: The old house on the hill, the one / I think no one lives in, the one / falling apart, filled with moss, / water, possums tracking mud, rotting / floorboards, window frames, fronted by / the long-grassed yard, suddenly changes / when the old-barked tree erupts into a dogwood's white petals. // I stop, / breathe in the sweetsick smell of flowering, / breathe in the pollen that will haunt me, / breathe in the suck of hardbreath dust, asbestos, / breathe in the blooming confusion, buzzing, / breathe in the all of it, the sun.

Thanks to Appalachian Journal and its new editor Jessica Cory for giving this poem a home in their recent issue. Shout outs to strange houses in the neighborhood, asthma, Appalachia, and William James!

An Exciting New Editorial Project

In addition to being a writer, I’m an editor. I’ve worked on several projects in the past including anthologies, book editing, editing a magazine, and more, but I had to step away from what I’d been doing when, within a year, I moved to Missouri, started my job, the pandemic happened, and I became a dad. A few years on from that experience, however, I’ve been missing being able to use the editorial side of my brain, and I’ve decided to start in again with a project that will allow me to explore at a small scale the various editorial interests I have.

My hope is to begin a/q as a home for two projects:

s w i f t s, a literary journal focused on a limited number of strong pieces I can showcase in each issue through editorial practices I’m excited about: online spaces, video poems, handmade ephemera, limited editions, and wherever else the pieces go

and the a/q pamphlet series which features writers, scholars, editors, translators, arts organizers, and more in an essay format (however they interpret that genre) on how they understand or question their work’s sense of process, change, learning, or growth

If you’re interested in being included in either part of the project, let me know. The first issues will be out later this year (!).

A Poem on My Mind: “Night Bird” by Danusha Laméris

Hear me: sometimes thunder is just thunder.
The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall
from the trees because the days are getting shorter,
by which I mean not the days we have left,
but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth
and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see
a therapist who mentioned that, at play,
he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain.
Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that.
Who can read the world? Its paragraphs
of cloud and alphabets of dust. Just now
a night bird outside my window made a single,
plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.
Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.

Originally published in Poetry Magazine

A Prompt

Pick a specific part of wherever you call home that’s part of your everyday routine, maybe a place you typically would look past, and describe it in such detail that it shows unexpected aspects of a particular time of year, of your life, or of the life of another.

I really appreciate all of you who’ve signed up, and I look forward to writing again soon. Please leave a comment, reply to this email, share it with people you think would enjoy it, or send me a note in some other way just to say hi (hi!)

Wishing you all the best things.

-Jeremy

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