Okay, okay, let me take a moment and humble-brag…wait, it’s not a humble-brag, it’s just a brag. Actually, it is a cool “first” and not necessarily one that I would ever have expected but I’m someone’s “Writer of the Week.” That someone is Maudlin House. But more than that it was also an introduction to a press and some writers who I didn’t know and who, frankly, are amazing.

Maudlin House is a Chicago-based literary press which has the pretty cool tagline “times are hard but we can still write weird”. And in addition to their website, they’ve got a pretty active Facebook and Twitter page.

I’m pretty excited to be included with the awesomeness that is Katie Condon , a wicked cool poet whose work focuses on the intersection between family, religion, and sex—particularly the ways conservative religious ideologies obscure and manipulate the ways we understand ourselves as sexual beings. You don’t get much more subversive than that, right? If you get a chance, click over and read her poem, Praying Naked. It is one of those quietly disturbing pieces that is all the more powerful for the truth it imparts, a truth that is real for far too many young women in our society

And John Brandon , who is from just up the way in Baltimore. Almost in contrast, his poetry reflects his Christian beliefs, but is definitely  filled with imagery of the Romanticists, and as he says of himself, he “likes writing a lot of floral imagery into his work and has been known to stack nature-scented metaphors atop each other like skyscrapers.” That is very much in evidence in his piece Of Dog and Flower.

You can find out more about them (and me) at the Writer of the Week post. I’m still kind of squee about that. I made someone’s Writer of the Week! Squeeeee!

And if after all of that you’re interested in reading a bit more, one of my favorite pieces up at Maudlin House is from February, Five Different Ways of Doing Monday Morning. It is a fun story that is really more of an old “Choose Your Own Adventure” book.