I can’t believe that I forgot to log this submission on my spreadsheet, and therefore forgot to mention it in my 2023 Writing in Review post!

Last March, Gnashing Teeth Publishing posted on Twitter that they were tearing pages out of a book (Dead Girl Running by Christina Dodd) and sending them to anyone who requested one. Once you got a page, you’d create an erasure or blackout poem and send it back to be published in an anthology.

I love strange constraints and any type of project, so I requested a page. When it came in the mail, I think I was frozen for a week or two. I had no clue where to start. What if I blacked out a word I wanted back later??

I decided to take a photo of the pages and use the mark up feature on my phone to draft some poems. I’m really glad I took that approach, though I don’t remember changing a lot of the words. In fact, I kept taking away more. But it was nice to have the original page to look back on when I wanted. And once I completed my poem, I could carefully black out the right sections on the book page.

With that done, I mailed the page off and waited. And forgot about it, honestly! Then preorders were announced, so I preordered and forgot about it again! Which means I was pleasantly surprised by a book in my mailbox one day.

It was so cool to not only see my poem in this book, but to see how other people approached the erasure aspect of the project. There are some works of art in here! It’s also really interesting to see how many poems kind of fit together. Probably because the book is one cohesive work so it’s understandable there’d be some overlap in the poems, but it’s still fascinating!

You can grab a copy here.