Welcome back to the Okay Donkey newsletter! As always, if you’re reading this in your web browser, make sure to subscribe so we’re in your inbox every month:

Did you know that Okay Donkey Magazine turns seven years old this month? We published our first piece on June 1, 2018: “The Flat,” flash fiction by Michael Alessi. But between poetry and flash, we published NINE pieces in June 2018! Check out the links in the previous sentence, which list all our published works from the very beginning.

Of course, we now publish just one piece per week in alternating genres as our commitment to publishing quality work lives on. Last month, we learned Best Small Fictions selected two OKD works for their 2025 anthology — more on that below. And even when they’re not winning and being nominated for awards, our alums are up to a lot of cool things. We’re thrilled we get to shout them out in every issue of this newsletter! (And here’s your regular reminder that if you’ve asked us to shout you out but don’t see yourself here yet, it’s coming!)

Want to learn more about Okay Donkey over time? In March, Fiction Reader Eleanor Ball highlighted three excellent pieces from OKD’s past. And in January, our staff picked our favorite pieces of 2024.

Not to divert from my friendly, detached newsletter writer voice for a moment — hi, it’s Christine, the social media manager — but I’ve been with OKD in a reader capacity since 2021, and it’s been so cool to see OKD’s growth over the past few years. I’m so happy you’re here to grow with us!

🫏 OKD Updates

Big congratulations to our 2025 Best Small Fictions anthology selections:

• Nicola Koh, “I’ve Been Getting Letters from Santa for Twenty Years and All I’ve Learned Is He’s an Asshole”

• Erinola E. Daranijo, “this because dog is god spelled backwards”

🌟 Hard Drive to Hard Copy: Revisiting Your Writing in a New Form

by Rina Palumbo, OKD Fiction Reader

We all have them: orphans, relics, artifacts, and rough drafts. As writers, it’s inevitable that not every piece of writing makes it out into the wider world, so we amass these documents on our hard drives. I was transferring documents to a new laptop and surprised myself by not copying everything. I decided instead to print out hard copies.

I am the sort who does this with a current work in progress, but getting everything out was something new. Having done it, I discovered that it made a real difference. Seeing those pieces on the page, in whatever form, made me appreciate them in new and often surprising ways.

There are obvious reasons for this. The paper page provides white space around the text, making it easy to make notes to yourself, but it also separates the work into tangible chunks. This makes you “read” the work differently, at once separated from it, and also more tactilely attached to it. Your interaction with it then changes as well. Also, my computer has so many sources of interruptions and temptations, which a page does not have — it is more immediate and present. It allows writerly and editorial responses from a different, more focused place.

So, having printed many pages of work, what did I discover?

First, the older material, pieces I hadn’t worked on or even thought about for years, revealed themselves as what they were — things that, even in completed form, didn’t offer anything for me to work with now. Or practice pieces that I could forget about, experiments in genres, forms, points of views, or even story ideas that really don’t belong to me anymore.

Second, having the newer material that I started with some inspiration or enthusiasm, but didn’t work on in print, made the most difference. By using many of them as prompts, I could generate more writing, completing many of them and having a clear direction about where to go with others.

Last, I found that several pieces connected or spoke to each other in some way. Having hard copies revealed that enough so that I was able to combine several shorter pieces into longer stories and essays.

I think that, as a writer, transferring the medium of your writing provides a new and dynamic way to approach and craft the stories you want to tell, let go of the ones you are done with, and play around with those odd beasts that still have things to say.

📚 May at OKD

• “Poor Cheryl” and “Love Me Like a Reptile,” flash fiction by Rachel Lastra

• “Bikini Atoll,” poetry by Rowan Pollard

• “A Reading List for the End of the World,” flash fiction by Julia Rose Greider

• “Double Dutch,” poetry by Jasmine Khaliq

• “Travel & Leisure” and “The Farm,” flash fiction by Linda Drach

🔎 Check Us Out

We love when past contributors keep us updated on their lives! If your work has ever appeared in OKD, reach out and tell us about your new book, project, album, etc. We’ll give you a shoutout on our socials and here in the newsletter.

• The audiobook version of Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Ruined a Little When We Are Born was released on May 27. (OKD: “Feeding Time,” “Closer,” and “My Mother Visits Me in America and is Offended by What the Dishwasher Can Do“)

• Allison Field Bell’s poetry chapbook Without Woman or Body will be released on June 20. (OKD: “Stitch”)

• Karan Chambers is part of Atomic Bohemian’s 2025-26 publishing lineup! (OKD: “I have an existential crisis on realizing my reading list is finite”)

• A happy update from our April newsletter: Amy Stuber won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection for her book Sad Grownups. (OKD: “Togetherland” and “Dead? Yes, Dead”)

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