So I picked up Cat’s Cradle, and without further ado I read half of it, sitting in the park by the Raritan River near my apartment. I finished it the next day.

It still might be the best book I have ever read.

Busy, busy, busy.

September marks the start(ish) of the Fall 2025 semester, my second semester as an adjunct instructor. It’s going so much easier than the first time around. I remember being anxious and exhausted all Spring 2025 semester—like the course was a ramp and I was always out of breath climbing up to the next class.

This fall, I finally feel like I know what I am doing with the course. I feel that I’m a better instructor and that my students are better students. But I think that’s reinforcing itself: I’m better, so they’re better; they’re better, so I’m better. I talked with my father, who’s been teaching undergraduate/graduate students for 30+ years, and he called it a virtuous cycle—like a vicious cycle, except with virtue instead of vice.

Busy, busy, busy.

On Sept 14, I read poetry from my upcoming debut chapbook identity sbagliato (and beyond!) at a virtual reading with Troublemaker Firestarter. You can listen to the recording of the reading here; I’m fourth in a great lineup of readers.

I’ve had exactly one poem come out this month. It’s called “card games” and it appeared in HAD on Sept 24. If it makes no sense to you, that’s fine. It didn’t make sense to HAD either, and they still published it.

All month long, I’ve been wrangling/reading submissions for underscore_magazine (submissions close Sept 30) and the Monarch Queer Literary Awards (nominations close Nov 30).

Busy, busy, busy.

In addition to getting back into reading, I’ve been trying to get back into submitting work for publication. I think I just need to set aside time for it. Since Sept 1, I’ve submitted to:

• fifth wheel press (closing Sept 30)

• en*gendered

• The /tƐmz/ Review (closing Oct 31)

• BRUISER

• The Kenyon Review (closing Sept 30)

• Foglifter (closing Nov 1)

• Welter (closing Sept 30)

• Blue Press

• ALOCASIA

• Gone Lawn

• manywor(l)ds (closing Oct 31)

• Dishsoap Quarterly

I await their responses eagerly—for those that haven’t already sent me short (but pleasant) rejections.

In short, a busy September. Stay well, friends, and I’ll see you all in October.

[pause for jubilation]

This chapbook is about… so many things. It’s an exploration of my coming-to-terms with my gender, through the lens of a half-remembered night out drinking. It’s early-twenties. It’s genderfuckery. It’s drag. I am so excited for you all to experience this with me.

Fun facts about identity sbagliato:

• The book contains poems previously published in ink & ivy lit, Roi Fainéant Press, new words {press}, and en*gendered. If you want to stalk my CV… you’ll probably find them.

• The acknowledgements includes Lady Gaga, because she damn well deserves to be acknowledged. She has a couple poems inspired by her in the book. But there are also poems after other artists: 100 gecs, Brownsville Station, Taylor Swift, Sleigh Bells, and Panic! At the Disco.

• The earliest poem in identity sbagliato was written January 2024, well before I knew gender was “complicated” for me.

If this sounds like fun to you, be on the lookout for updates from me! Cover & blurbs & pre-order links to come. I guarantee it.

Oh, and I’ll be reading virtually this coming Sunday, 9/14, at 7pm eastern. Featuring poems from identity sbagliato and beyond. Catch ya there?

Now, of course, the students are coming back into the library. The semester starts tomorrow, and I’d love to say I’m ready. But are we ever ready? I don’t think anyone ever is, but I’m looking forward to the next few months (even though I know I’ll be exhausted at the end of it all).

Anyway, new work out for July & August, in chronological order:

• “the fantasy” in Troublemaker Firestarter volume 9 / order here

• “the teeth” in dog teeth lit issue CAVE CANEM / read here

• “Terraforming Luna” in James Gunn’s Ad Astra / read here

• “gay awakening as revealed through men’s hockey rpf” on fifth wheel press blog / read here

I don’t have any work forthcoming in a magazine right now—a strange feeling. I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from submitting individual poems/stories over the summer. I haven’t taken a hiatus from writing, though. My notes app is full of gems. I hope to get crackin’ at submissions in the coming weeks.

Speaking of submissions, I’ll be busy next month reading them! I’ll be open for underscore_magazine submissions for issue 6 through the month of September. I’m also serving as a first-round reader for Monarch Queer Literary Awards, which will be reading submitted nominations from September through the end of November. Monarch, a new fifth wheel press project, is meant to showcase the best queer writing and artwork appearing in literary magazines and independent presses. I’m a founding editorial board member, but I like to joke that my title should be “spreadsheet wrangler” since I’m handling most of the behind-the-scenes on the submission form.

Other antics I’ve gotten up to:

• Learned how to do winged eyeliner

• Visited the Boston cop slide

• Saw the Yankees play, twice, even though I’m a Mets fan

• Said “yeah, I’ll be at AWP” to enough people that I feel I have to attend

Well, here’s to the end of August. Hopefully the coming month is lovely, but not so lovely that I forget I have a newsletter. Stay well.

I wrote an article diving deeper into the data quilt—the trends within, the lessons learned, and more—and it came out a few weeks ago in early June with dh+lib. It’s part of a special issue on crafting encounters with humanities data. A huge shoutout to the dh+lib editors (including my former professor/collaborator Claudia Berger!) for their care and attention with editing and publishing this issue.

You can read my article, for free, right here.

And (because I love to yap about this!) I presented my quilt at the American Library Association Annual Conference & Exhibition this past weekend at a poster session. Yes, my quilt became a poster.

The poster session went incredibly well. I had someone tell me they came upstairs to the session because they saw my poster title on the conference app and were interested in seeing it in person. I had someone from Springshare ask if I’d be willing to talk about how I used their data collection software in a future webinar. And, most importantly, I had a constant stream of people asking questions, reading the poster, touching the quilt, and just engaging with my work.

Now, the quilt is hanging in my office at FDU… hoping that a student or two who meets with me this fall notices and asks about it. I’m never done yapping about this.

Of course, that’s not all. I have some literary work out this month too—three poems and one short speculative fiction piece. Check them out:

• “on the mutual ending of Thelma & Louise” in Libre
  Read here.

• “questioning” in en*gendered

  Read here.

• “the sound of violence” in earworms magazine

  Read here.

• “Ratqueen” in Defiance & Dialogue
  Read here.

I hope your June was joyous. I hope your July is, too. Stay well, friends.

One thing I’d like to do better this fall is provide visual examples of poor information/media literacy. I’ve been bookmarking tweets for my Fall 2025 class under the category “AI images that fooled me” in hopes to foster a reasonable discussion of how, well, AI images can fool even your most intrepid librarians. Some examples: this cool guy and this cute kitty, both AI generated. And to discuss media literacy this fall, I’ve saved what’s possibly the most media illiterate tweet of all time (featuring an AI generated image to boot). My goal isn’t to get political, but to point out how misreading a piece of media can have disastrous results.

Oh, what’s that? I have some fresh literary work out:

• “gender as hag” with new words {press} — purchase issue here

• “not dead, stunned.” with Plork Press — read anthology here

• “the most wanted person (please please please please please) with Querencia Press — purchase anthology here

This is my first time working with nw{p} and Querencia—brooklyn and Emily (respectively) have both been lovely editors to work with. And this is my second Plork appearance, but with a different lead editor this time (shoutout Bree!).

And in case you missed it, I curated, edited, and published the 5th issue of underscore_magazine earlier this May, featuring the work of 20 creatives. Explore the issue here. I am literally so proud of this issue, and I cannot believe this is my fifth (technically sixth) publication cycle. When I started this magazine in February 2023, I never thought I’d get this far, or get to publish so much excellent work. I’m promoting individual contributors’ work on underscore_magazine’s Twitter and Instagram, so be on the lookout for those promo posts, too.

I’m a little late on this recap because I was on vacation/celebrating turning 25. Yeah, I know, I’m an oldhead.

It’s June. Happy Pride! May this month bring you queer joy. And stay well, friends.

For NaPoMo I used Taylor Byas and Séamus Fey’s form challenge calendar, which I started using last year, as a prompt for each day of April. It’s always fun to play with my favorite forms and explore new ones. (No need to talk about the forms I dislike… cough the ballad cough)

This year, I was exceptionally fond of the cradle-magnolia, a new poetic form created by Patrycja Humienik. It’s a dreamy one. Here’s my attempt at the cradle-magnolia, which I wrote on April 5:

on a drive home from work I wonder if you know what it feels like before it begins. 
I wonder if you know what you will become, if you build your cocoon 
without knowing how you will emerge. I wish I could be so brave.
I think of how you become soup. I wonder how
that feels, too, to lose all of your defined edges. 
must we change without knowing?
or can we know before we start?
I am soft around the edges too, you know,  
beginning to become something of which I am not yet 
aware. today my gender is soup. I sit in the slippery discomfort,
wrap myself in a warm blanket, wonder in the grey morning light. 
I never knew what it felt like to become. you didn’t either, I think. none of us do. 

You can read the rest of my NaPoMo poems on Twitter, all in this neat thread.

In terms of publications, new poems of mine appeared in Circus Collective and fifth wheel press this month. Please check them out—these are two of my favorite publishers and I am always delighted to work with Devon and nat.

My semester is almost over, and I honestly cannot believe it is coming to an end. For those not in the know, I’ve been teaching a 3-credit information and technological literacy course for undergraduates. It fills a core requirement at my university, so it’s popular class! It’s also incredibly practical—research skills, technology skills, and information/media/news/data literacy skills are all essential.

Teaching has been a wonderful experience, even though it’s also been exhausting. This is my first time teaching an entire course, and it’s been a ton of work. Creating lessons and materials, making sure students understand concepts, grading assignments—there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes of professors’ lives.

One thing I’ve tried to bring to my classroom is games—specifically card games and board games. I’ve used a couple games made by other librarians/instructors, and I’ve made a couple of my own! I’m trying so hard to make MLA citations fun… it’s not something that’s easy to get students excited about.

Because I’ve been teaching, quilt work has taken a bit of a backseat. I need to get to work on my data quilt, though, because I am presenting it at the ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition in June.

Here’s hoping for a glorious May. Stay well, friends.

What’s a reference transaction, you ask? Any time someone approaches a librarian with a question, no matter how big or small, they are engaging in a reference transaction with that librarian. Transactions range from “how do I print a document?” to “can you help me find Open Educational Resources from the last 5 years focusing on human resources standards and practices in the United States?”

Librarians log these transactions, usually with fancy library software.

We do this for a few reasons. It’s a way to show what kind of questions we're receiving, as well as when and how we’re receiving them. It’s also a way to justify our existence to the upper echelons of administration at the universities we work for. The budget looms over academic libraries. If librarians can show how many people they help, they can justify remaining on the payroll.

This bothers me. I should clarify, because multiple things bother me, but right now I specifically mean that librarians collect and generate data for the purpose of “we should continue to exist.” And it bothers me that the data in question is anonymized, reduced to a statistic, and reported to a provost I’ve met exactly once over Zoom. The personal touch, the human part of reference, is scrubbed.

Enter critical making. I first encountered critical making through my friend, classmate, and collaborator Gabby Evergreen, who I met at Pratt Institute. In our second semester of our master’s, Gabby created a quilt that was also a map that was also a digital storytelling project, and I was mesmerized. At Pratt, I also had the privilege of meeting and studying under Claudia Berger. Over a year later, I attended a workshop led by Gabby, Claudia, and other cool folks at the Digital Humanities 2024 conference. It focused on #dhmakes, or the making-physical-stuff side of digital humanities. There, Claudia taught a table of us how to quilt using English paper piecing. And the idea for this project began to form.

What is this project? This project is taking every reference transaction I had last semester, categorizing it, matching that category with a fabric pattern, and quilting together those patterned pieces of fabric into a physical object: a data quilt.

The patterns are colorful and geometric and loud, and the quilt is not going to look beautiful or cohesive.

Data is messy, and reference work is messy, and I want to embrace that. I want it to look as chaotic as the ref desk does.

Before I go on, I should mention I am doing this project by hand. I do not own a sewing machine and I don’t intend to purchase one. And, well—I have a lot of data points to stitch together.

200 data points, in fact.

200 reference transactions.

200 paper and fabric hexagons.

I’ve quilted137 out of 200 so far. To me, that is a victory—quilting over half of my reference transactions, all while working full-time, teaching, commuting, writing, editing, living. I’ve only got 63 to go now. Wish me luck?

If we haven’t met, hello! I’m Erica Leslie Weidner. You can call me Erica.

I’m a librarian, professor, writer, and editor based in New Jersey. I hope that this space can be helpful for documenting aspects of my creative life, whether that be at work (as a librarian and professor) or at play (as a writer and editor). And I hope that you enjoy the ride with me as I write.