This morning I woke up early, sat down at my computer and, before switching off the Internet (which I usually do so I can focus on my writing), took a look at the wonderful online journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. I had to see it with my own eyes to be sure: yes, my essay “Walden, Revisited” has been published in their March issue.
This is my second appearance in Connotation Press; In January of 2011 the journal published “No One Watches the Old Lady Dance.” And I couldn’t be happier to be back in this journal. In addition to publishing fantastic work, the journal is home to some of the warmest, most generous editors I have so far met in the literary world. Ken Robidoux (Editor-in-Chief), Robert Clark Young (CNF Editor), and Meg Tuite (Fiction Edtior) are lively, talented, prolific artists who are dedicated not only to the production of a fine journal but also to supporting the writers they publish (and I’m sure even those they don’t). I don’t know the poetry editor, Kaite Hillenbrand, but I know enough about her to say that she is also a mover and a shaker.
I wrote the first draft of “Walden, Revisited” as a journal entry on an October day two years ago while sitting at the edge of Walden Pond. My laptop was propped up on a retaining wall near a small beach area that is crowded with swimmers every summer. That day was actually my birthday, but that fact got dropped out of the journal entry as it was transformed over the weeks and months that followed into an essay that meditates on the pond and the natural world.
I hope you enjoy “Walden, Revisited.” And be sure to check out the work of the other writers featured in this journal. Every issue absorbs and surprises, and is a worthy read.
