Hi, friends! Thanks for sticking with us for another edition of the Okay Donkey newsletter. If you’re not subscribed yet, we hope you’ll consider it:

This month, we’re excited to share a special feature from OKD Poetry & Fiction Reader Jessica Heron about figuring out what genre your writing is in. Heron investigates the poem “Breakfast, 3 a.m.” by Dawn Macdonald, which we published last month, and we’ve even got Macdonald herself weighing in on how her poem is, well, a poem. We also take a quick look at how our new readers are powering Okay Donkey, as well as our usual shoutouts and a recap of July’s publications.

Thanks again for being here! Enjoy the newsletter.

🫏 OKD Updates

Over the past few months, Okay Donkey has onboarded an army of new poetry and flash fiction readers. Thanks to our submitters’ enthusiasm, our free submissions (which refresh on the first day of each month) now fill up in a few days, so we’re grateful for their help! Plus, we’ve still got a consistent stream of paid submissions the rest of the month. Naturally, our readers’ effort and impact aren’t lost on our editors.

“It feels like we’ve got more horsepower in the engine,” fiction editor Steve Chang said of the impact of the new readers. “And upgraded the steering.” Poetry editor Carolene Kurien added, “Adding new readers has decreased our turnaround times, and we’re grateful we can get through your wonderful submissions a bit faster than we used to.”

A big, public shoutout to our readers for all their hard work reading, discussing, and sometimes even fighting for their favorite pieces to be published!

🌟 What Genre Am I In? (feat. Dawn Macdonald)

by Jessica Heron, OKD Poetry & Fiction Reader

If you’re not sure which genre you’re writing in, that’s probably a good thing. Good writing is boundaryless, and a little cross-pollination can bolster or better inform whatever writing project you’re working on. Don’t worry about genre — just keep writing.

But do worry about genre a little bit when you start submitting your work. This is probably the only time genre really counts. Some publications will hold a space for hybrid, genreless, or even, though more rare, the “I have no idea what this is” genre. But in most cases, you will see the traditional categories of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. If you’re writing prose poems, versified fiction, fiction based entirely on real people and events, poetic paragraphs, true stories as poem cycles, whatever the case may be, let the work and your gut guide you. You probably have a feeling about what genre it is, so trust yourself. Alternatively, test your writing. Is your writing aligned with the basic conventions of the genre you started in, or the genre you intend? Or is it leaning more toward a different direction?

Let’s take a look at a recent poem published in Okay Donkey: Dawn Macdonald’s “Breakfast, 3 a.m.” It contains elements of fiction, like narrative, characters, and recurring motifs; plus, the visual suggests prose, or paragraph. What tips this toward poetry, however, is the turning of the line in intentional spaces before the line hits the right margin, the use of parentheses for aesthetics and meaning (versus the normal job of punctuation in fiction to assist the reader), and dream-like imagery and syntactical play, such as the placement of the prepositional phrase “at any rate” in “The sound of frying / felt at any rate neutral.” (lines 3-4).

The poet Macdonald weighed in, too, saying: “I tend to think almost anything can be poetry! That said, poetry seems to attend more closely to non-syntactical elements like sound, space and breath. My poem starts off with a lot of nasal sounds (M’s and N’s, those baby sounds as in ‘mama’ or ‘nana’) but by the end it’s all sibilants, the sound of frying. A prose writer has these same resources at hand but a poem can really make a meal of them.”

So as you may well see, when you’re writing or submitting work, the question “What genre am I in?” might give you brain freeze. To unfreeze it, go with your gut feeling, test your writing against established examples, or just close your eyes and click. Seriously. Send your work around. If you’re unsure of which genre to choose, give it your best guess, and trust that if your writing connects with submission readers and editors, they will find a place for it, even if it’s not for the genre you had originally intended. Most importantly, keep writing what makes sense to you, and keep sending it out. Eventually it’ll land.

📚 July at OKD

• “Breakfast, 3 a.m.,” poetry by Dawn Macdonald

• “Divine Creatures and Monsters Alike,” flash fiction by M.M. Kaufman

• “Time Only Looks Human,” poetry by Lynne Jensen Lampe

• “The Way My Mother, Who Refuses to Die, Is Like A Ford Taurus,” flash fiction by Danielle Barr

🔎 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.

• Luigi Coppola’s book Even God Gets Distracted Sometimes (with Mark Shuttleworth) came out July 31. (OKD: “The Sharp < Parents > Have a Round ( Child ),” Aug. 2024)

• Hannah Grieco’s story collection First Kicking, Then Not is out Aug. 12. (OKD: “Puffy Little Pink Heart,” Sept. 2021)

• OKD Fiction Editor Steve Chang is an August resident at Willapa Bay AiR.

• OKD Social Media Manager Christine Salek has a handful of new zines out, including English Major Starter Pack and Morning Person.

• OKD Fiction Reader Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin is teaching a virtual craft talk and workshop called “Writing the Speculative Diaspora.” Participants can attend Monday, Sept. 1 or Sunday, Sept. 7. (Course description/payment info)

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