New Work Accepted!

I love going to the garden to see my tomatoes, red from the sun and abundant heat, to inspect the cucumbers like little water balloons almost about to burst, and the beans, heavy on the vine or beginning as string ready to wax out into bulbous pods. There is this strange mix of emotions: pride at what I’ve accomplished and astonishment at what the little garden has achieved on its own.

Sometimes I just sit back and watch it grow.

Lately, it’s been the same with my garden of words. I formed them into patches, rows—planted earlier during dreary spring with only a forethought of what the summer might bring. Two pieces I wrote ages ago, revised somewhat recently, and have sent out have been accepted.

The longer “essay” No One Goes to Albania is a memory piece about a trip through the Balkans the Fall of 2007. I totally understood why it was hard to categorize as it didn’t fit easily into a travelogue or memoir. More about “home” and feeling “foreign” in strange times. There’s also the misogynist folktale of the woman being cemented into a fortress wall with only her breast exposed so that she could continue to nurse her baby.

No more needs to be said.

The second piece Names for Birds definitely is a weirdo.  A bit prose poem, found poem, attribution poem, Wikipedia, response. It was too long and singular when most journals, if they take poetry at all, want three or four shorties that may or may not be linked. This was over 400 words and mostly a riff on the names for birds and how they congregate, sourced from the world wide web. Or how a murder of crows sort of is what it is, like how a gaggle of geese sounds the same.

We’ll see. I’ll post more here and at my Facebook and at my Substack (Jane Hertensein, Freeze Frame) when they’re actually out in the world.

Same for:

FLASH FICTION

“Three Doors” FORTHCOMING, 2025, The Writers’ Journal

“Sea of Lingerie” FORTHCOMING, Hoot

“Riding Bikes at Night” (prose poem) Forthcoming Fall 2025, Ink in Thirds

Till then, read:

Circa 1984 in Switch, scroll down