Old publication; new life: the moon that sways the tides

Culebrita, Puerto Rico, 2017

Last year I became a parent for the second (and last!) time, and my writing practice slid from slow to nonexistent, which is why I’m so grateful to my friend, Anthony Garrett, who I met at Tin House Winter Workshop last year, for allowing me to submit work previously published at a now defunct, beloved journal, Entropy, to the new literary magazine co-founded by himself and Joely Fitch, atmospheric lit. A literary journal devoted to cloud-like writing, in the inaugural issue editor’s note, Anthony writes, “atmospheric quarterly arises from a craving for writing that reads everything other than the borders drawn on literary maps, from an excitement about literature that refuse its own calcification.” If you know me, you know that’s my writer’s siren call.

Please read the whole gorgeous issue at the link above! My three micros can be found here. It is a special honor to have the first piece, “the moon is far away yet it sways the tide,” selected as the April 7, 2024 featured poem at Poetry Daily.

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New publication: fog or cloud

entropy di jayawickrema fog or a cloud hybrid micros

I didn’t think this loose hybrid micro series would find a home. The pieces felt too small, some too strange and some too colloquial, and all disconnected even though I knew the pieces were connected in a way I couldn’t articulate. I’m gratified and relieved it found a home in Entropy Magazine’s “Fog or a Cloud” series inspired by this quote from Etel Adnan: “… [images] they are pure feeling. They’re like something that calls you through a fog or a cloud.” The editor, Morgaine Baumann writes of the series: “What do you, or we, rely on our memories for? When, or are, memories accurate representations of the past? Does it matter? A little more specifically, I’m thinking, can memories be passed down genetically? Emotional/ physical traces carried from one generation to another, ultimately showing up in our writing? How can this be shown through syntax? In image? If through image, then are the images by extension also what’s being passed down?”

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New publication: (in)completeness

3 Micro-stories by Di Jayawickrema Burning House Press

Photo Credit: Simon Abrams, Unspash

Probably, a day will come when I don’t announce every new publication with a mini-essay on process but today isn’t that day. I’m proud and grateful to have my first microfiction appear in a press I just learned of and already love: 3 Micro-stories by Di Jayawickrema in Burning House Press.

There were eight years between my first publication and my second. I spent that period contending with the immigration system, and the process changed me in ways I still don’t fully understand. I didn’t write a creative word in those eight years. I do some community-based work around immigration now — in my view, immigration is a death spectrum — from actual death to death by countless cuts if you’re lucky, and I was lucky. It isn’t a coincidence that I only started writing again when I got my green card.

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