I’ve been thinking lately about being published. I’ve been in love with books forever. I remember when I was a kid, sitting up with my sisters at night as our mom read us bedtime stories. I remember the color of the book of fairy tales, the feel of the glossy pages as she let me hold one side of the book (it made me feel important), running my finger down the table of contents to pick a story, the vivid illustrations. Once I learned how, I always wanted to read the stories out loud myself.

Now in my early twenties, after obtaining a degree in English (of course), books have ceased to be about only pleasure. Books are now studied. Images are pounced on to uncover the symbolism. The words inside not only make a world in the book but effect the world outside, the world the reader inhabits. One of the books I’m reading right now is Enchanted Hunters by Maria Tatar and it studies the power of stories in childhood–the stories aren’t just about themselves anymore; now I’m reading books that study the effect of the stories I read once upon a time.

So being published, being read by strangers, is a dream, something I want to happen before I die. I submitted three poems to Ohio State’s “The Journal” and to Bowling Green’s Mid-American Review on the advice of a friend a few weeks ago and I’m waiting to hear back from them. I’m pretty excited about it, actually. I check both sites to see if the review status has changed, but it’s only been a month since submission and it can take anywhere from one to five months. I’m a bit impatient…so people tell me.

But sometimes I daydream about an Emily Dickinson-esque rise to fame. A friend or a family member finds my journals after I’m gone and decides to publish all of them as a lasting tribute to me (that’s kind of a downer, I know). I’m nothing like Dickinson–she has a level of brilliance I will never in my life capture. I love her, she made me appreciate American writers when I had all but given up on them. But Dickinson gives hope to the authors who sit in bedrooms night after night, scratching pen across paper, wondering if their unread words will ever matter to anyone but themselves-journals full of poems, drawers full of scribbling, bound by spirals and paperclips and rubberbands.

Emily Dickinson gives us hope of an immortality, almost. A way of remaining without being alive. Humans are not immortal; our words, however, can be.