I’m feeling very international at the moment.  I have a short story in the new online journal Anomalous (based in the US), two poems in the New Zealand feature of the online International Literary Quarterly, another poem in UK-based print journal Magma and one in the Australian print journal etchings.  Some of it is work I submitted 18 months ago, but somehow it’s all appearing in the same week.

The Anomalous connection came about courtesy of the Tuesday Poem.  Last December, the Tuesday poets paired up and swapped poems with each other, and I was lucky enough to be paired with the wonderful American poet Melissa Green.  An Anomalous editor (Cat Parnell) read my poem on Melissa’s blog and asked if I had anything else.  Anomalous also features recordings of the writers reading their work.  My story, Tattooed Ladies, is here.  Or you can watch a great little 30 second clip of the entire journal here.  Anomalous describes itself as “a non-profit press dedicated to the diffusion of writing in the forms it can take”.

The International Literary Quarterly is in the process of publishing more than a hundred NZ writers over the next couple of months.  I’m part of the third instalment, alongside Tim Jones, Janet Charman, Robin Fry, Sonia Yelich and many others.  My poems are here.  The NZ literary showcase also features NZ artworks and is well worth dipping into.

Magma is a longstanding UK journal, packed with great poetry and interesting articles.  I am in Magma 49, the ‘Build it up & knock it down’ issue, which sports a lovely digger on the cover.  (I always thought it would be fun to drive one, but I have no doubt it would end up stuck in a swamp, like the time I was in charge of some sort of sandbag compacting machine).

Etchings is based in Melbourne and published by Ilura Press.  The issue I am in is etchings 9: Love & Something.  The cover image is by Adam Elliot, the clay animator responsible for that great little movie ‘Mary and Max‘ about  the friendship between a little Australian girl and a reclusive American man.

Whew!  So much reading material.  Got to be a good thing.