Last night, I drove to my father's house for a last minute visit. I got in and my father greeted me, asked how the drive was, told me where my pile of mail was, asked what I'd like for dinner.
I went to the pile of mail and there was a large envelope from some university in Iowa. Dad said he wasn't sure if he should have kept it and I joked that it was probably an advertisement from a law school (yep, they're still sending me those). Instead I opened it up to find nice quality paper with a letter that began Dear Eileen, we would very much like to publish ...
Eeeeeeee!
There's no date for publication yet, but North American Review wants to publish a poem of mine sometime in the near future! *squeal!*
This particular poem had been out for so long (over ten months) that I assumed the magazine had rejected it (and its packet of friends) without even dropping my SASE back in the mail to let me know the gig was up. It appears I should have been more patient.
I'd come to assume that my first publishing credit was going to come from online newbies that paid only in karma*, so acceptance from someplace like North American Review is really flooring.
*more squealing* Eeeeeee!
(*Not that I'm going to stop submitting to those journals or hoping that I get published in them, just saying this is pretty damn cool.)
