Hello my lovelies, it’s been a couple of months since I started my self-imposed hiatus and, I’m glad to say, it’s been quite a creative and productive period for me. Good news and announcements first:

• the project that I started almost exactly a year ago, my poetry collection titled Beneath the Surface, is ready for publication!!! I am hoping to have it out by the end of March! (fingers crossed!)
• my Slavic-mythology inspired short stories will be up and running in no time (springtime inspires mischief in Iriy)
• my fantasy novel is in its last draft (finally!!)
• and I’ve completed two academic research papers that are to be published this year! (how to teach reading and poetry in culturally responsive classrooms)

I’ll be organising giveaways and looking for reviewers soon, so stay tuned!

I am leaving you with a poem that introduces my upcoming poetry collection and reflects these turbulent times that we’re currently going through, in the hope that there is a light shimmering above the murky surface.

To the Surface

Writhing on the floor
in the mess of my own making,
I plummet towards destruction
after another abrupt awakening
that has pushed me deep down
into my cavernous mind
where the beasts reside,
voracious, slobbering, unfed
ready to drag me into the ginnels of Time
to ram their tongues into my pale scars
and suck out what’s left inside

Yet there’s the light,
the shimmer that drags me
up to the surface
of the sombre seas,
away from the monstrous maws
and the tentacled embrace.
It is the thought of you
that makes me breach
the ice-encrusted waters,
and breathe yet again.

© 2020 Erna Grcic