If you’re a technology-challenged poet like me, whose browser activities don’t elevate past Google Suite, I can probably guess your feelings on the use of Artificial Intelligence in poetry and literature. We have many reasons to fear the murky territory of AI, especially in regards to the ethical concerns around privacy, intellectual property and plagiarism.

But should we be so quick to toss out the tube-grown baby with the bathwater? 

In 2023, I shot off 67 submissions across various literary magazines and poetry contests around the world. I had zero strategy and was quite indiscriminate in whatI sent and where I sent it. From those 67 submissions, I received 4 acceptances, a rate of 5.9%. 

After I began my first editorial role at Tabula Rasa Review midway through 2023, I learnt very quickly how unproductively I had been approaching the submission process.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Maya Angelou said, "to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power." Motherhood is power and motherhood is beginnings. Power because mothers grow a life into being and beginnings because that was the site our creation, our first breath began there, with a mother.