TIMOTHY OTTE
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Stepping down from Hazel & Wren

6/29/2015

1 Comment

 
It's been a quiet few months and I wanted to write about why.
Here's a few items of note:
  • 3 poems available in Issue 11 of SAND Journal, available now.
  • 2 poems accepted by Tinderbox Poetry Journal, a beautiful online magazine you should get to know.
  • I'm reading at a Maeve's Session in August.
  • I've written a handful of reviews: Marie NDiaye, Kate Tempest, Chika Sagawa, and Sarah Jean Alexander.
  • The Mentor Series is winding down. I'm going to miss regularly scheduled meetings with this group, but I can't begin to express how much I love the people I met and the program itself.
manuscript-in-progressWhat my manuscript looks like as of today.
Also winding down is my time with Hazel & Wren. I will be stepping down as Senior Editorial Associate at Hazel & Wren after 4 years of updating the Calendar of (Un)Deadlines and writing monthly reviews for the What We're Reading column. After my 50th review is posted on July 16th, 2015 I will no longer be an active member of the team.

This wasn't an easy decision to make, but I believe it's time for me to focus more fully on other projects and opportunities. 
With the Mentor Series over, the 50-review milestone approaching, and another draft of FEATHERMUCKER nearly complete, I've been thinking about my desire to focus on my own writing and reading.

I can say without reservation that I would not be the writer and reader—which is to say the person—that I am today without four years with Hazel & Wren. I'm a better reader and a better critic, which means I'm a better poet. I've learned how to find submission opportunities and how to send out poems. Saying that I wrote for Hazel & Wren bought me an extra five minutes to talk with other people about ideas and books. I've made some brilliant friends by opening with the line, "Hi, I'm Timothy— I work with Hazel & Wren."

Melissa and Amanda, Hazel & Wren's founders, are wonderful people, terrific editor, and fantastic friends. They created an excellent hub of literary opportunities and it's been an honor to help that hub grow. I want to thank them for giving me a chance when I emailed them out of the blue to say, "Hey, I love what you're doing and I want to be part of it, if you'll let me.
" I can't wait to resume my original role of Hazel & Wren reader, cheerleader, and member of the community.

So what comes next? My poems will be my main focus: writing and revising new ones, sending them out (and being more diligent about doing this), and trying to get this manuscript into the world. But I only write good poems when I'm reading a lot, and I do love to talk about books. As such, I have this dumb idea to blog my way through the books on my shelf that I've never read.

I'm also looking forward to following a bit of a meandering path with my reading, tumbling down the rabbit hole of influence and climbing back out. What if I spent a month reading only Elizabeth Bishop's work? Or John Ashbery? What if I only read sonnets (Shakespeare, Bernadette Mayer, Nick Demske, etc.). What if I read only books mentioned in essays or letters by my favorite poets? What if, what if...?

And maybe more! I still have a lot of learning to do.


1 Comment
Alice link
7/1/2022 06:58:15 am

Hi nice reading yoour blog

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    Timothy Otte

    is an art maker whose text has appeared in or is forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, LitHub, SAND Journal, the minnesota review, Sundog Lit, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Structo, and others. He was a 2014-15 Loft Mentor Series winner and is currently working on his first collection of poems. He is from and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he works at Coffee House Press. His tweets appear whenever. Say his last name like body.

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