Episode 1282: Pleasantly Surprised...

Went to Leamington for an open mic night, but it wasn't that fantastic, so we relocated to a different pub along the Parade. Got a lift back to campus from David, which was great because I'd actually expected to have to get a cab back from Leamington. We chatted a bit about Eunoia Review, and I was saying that the volume of submissions has by no means been constant. Of course, that totally jinxed me and I switched my laptop on to find five submissions waiting in my inbox. I've dealt with all of them now, in my usual timely fashion. On a side note, I want to say that I'm really humbled by the reach this one-man operation is beginning to have. I'm not one of those editors who's swayed by whether a submitter has been published previously or how established they are as a writer, but I do look contributors up after I've issued an acceptance, either to follow them on Twitter (if they have an account) or just out of curiosity to see what else they've done. So imagine my surprise when I found out that the latest poet whose work I've accepted has done a book of translations that was published by Carcanet in 2006. It was like that moment a while back when I accepted poems from someone who turned out to be the head of department at an American university. I really, really want to know how these people are coming across what barely even qualifies as a shoestring operation, run entirely in my spare time (although I probably already spend too much time on it), considering that apart from following contributors on Google+ and Twitter, and pushing posts on the site to all my social media accounts, I don't really do that much to promote the journal, beyond getting it listed on a couple of sites that index literary journals. I was also pleased to see a comment from Carrie Etter on the latest poem published on Eunoia Review! I've met Carrie once at a reading in the Writers' Room, but I'd completely forgotten she was from Normal, IL, and it's amazing that she's a regular visitor to the coffeehouse that's the subject of the poem. Talk about synchronicity. I don't even know how she would have come across the journal, to be honest.