ejectionletter

Hey all,

I recently entered a wine writing contest to put my two loves to work for me: wine drinking and writing. The added benefit of the reward being cash just sweetens the deal. Naturally, as all contest go these days, it's up to me to get my piece out there for people to see and if they read it, like it, and express that through different social mediums, I'll win! So, here's the deal: I'd love for you to read my piece on my "wine epiphany" (the wine that introduced me to loving wine), and then, on the left hand navigation of the page, there are options to tweet it, like it, plus it, and recommend it for stumbleupon. The more hits I get on each of these different social media outlets, the greater chance I have of winning. Not to mention, I'm up against published authors (not fair) and I really really love the contest. (: It'd mean a lot to me if you took a few seconds to do this for me!
Here's the link: www.snooth.com/articles/my-fir…

Let me know if you do. I want to thank you personally!

Best,
Kelsey

I have a question for you all - if you've submitted to a literary journal before (poetry), where did you submit? I'm looking for something relatively small, low-key, and without a whole bunch of crazy accolades, so that I can try my hand at submitting poetry. Also, and I guess this question should come before the previous one, do you think that I could submit work somewhere and have it considered seriously?
Thanks much!

I feel fall in my bones like summer is begging me to find it - pull the leaves from the trees in fistfuls, strip the bark from the branches and use it to bed down, deep in the dirt to slide away from it all. The big maple off the back porch refuses to believe me, vivid, phosphorescent leaves linger on their stems and I realize its mid-July and no one is going anywhere just yet.
The chill hangs in the atmosphere somewhere else; maybe the mountain states will pull it down around me like a blanket, like a little felt hat. I can't wait to feel my ears tingle, turn red in the cold. But we're a season away from nose-blowing and little red fingertips in the frost, searching for lost rings or a pen cap.
I'm sleeping next to the cat, our bodies both too hot to wear the sheets. Like capes, they billow out from behind us in the breeze and we shiver when the sweat drops into the mattress like a watermark denoting that we'd been there. We breathe in time, a rhythm I wasn't sure existed until I found it in my pulse, in the animal indents in my skin. And we shudder, still hot despite the wind.
Our season has come and gone too. We're spring hatchlings, tiny down comforter birds that are born from rain and fresh new weather. I find myself crying more often than laughing. My hands in my pockets like there's something there for safekeeping, something lost rather than found. We're lost leaves, the Japanese Maple's red glow through the winter. We're the ground littered with deer hoof prints. Any season but this.

Hello all,
It has been a while since I have done a journal entry and with some new links for you guys, I finally decided that it was time to sit down and write a brief, informative entry.
This summer I am heading out to Denver to take part in a publishing program at the University of Denver. I'm excited and I leave in July. The advance assignments, however, are hefty. I am working through them at a painstakingly slow pace. Ugh! I am, though, filling up a moleskine (trying to write every day but averaging about every-other-day instead) with poems. I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing and forcing myself to be creative and get inspired. I carry the journal with me everywhere and note little things down. You probably have seen an upswing in activity and that's from the moleskine work! I hope you're enjoying it.
As always, if you want to follow me around the web, I have some links for you:
Follow me on tumblr at gardenofverses.tumblr.com (I also have a wedding details blog for fun at thebouquet.tumblr.com)
You can follow me on my (almost never updated) twitter at twitter.com/kelseymalie
I've been posting my photos on flickr, and you can find me there at flickr.com/gardenofverses
Last but not least, and the most exciting link, I've started a wine blog!! If you're into wine and want suggestions for good wine on a budget, please come follow me at gradsguidetowine.blogspot.com . If you have a google account you can "+1" my posts to recommend the blog and you can also follow it using blogger or subscribe to the RSS. It would mean a lot to me. I'm just starting it and trying to get it off the ground, a struggle!
Hope you're all well,
Kelsey

I'm writing when I'm sad and when I'm lonely. When I lean into your chest and think I smell the sea. When I wake up to four walls and no windows in a basement that smells like a space heater pushing deep against the air inside. I'm not writing as much as I used to, as much as I want to, as much as I need to, but nobody seems to notice but my pens and pencils sitting unused in the top drawer of the desk.
I'm slamming drawers shut in the afternoon, whittling nothing out of something, drinking coffee until my teeth turn black, chewed lips stained with espresso shots, and pulling the covers up to my neck because the air feels like bee stings.
I poked a jellyfish in the stomach with a pine bough when I wandered down the beach in March and I wished that I had something more than your left hand to hold and my right hand to feel the brush of raindrops. I kicked up sand beneath my feet and felt the pebbles slide down into my sneakers now the gray smell and color of a clay shoreline.
I'm writing yearbook entries into my diary "I remember when" and "Never change" and "Keep in touch" but I'm not addressing them to anyone anymore, not putting postage stamps on the outside of bulky envelopes, not sending my words to the sea because I've forgotten the zip code.