A Corn Moon Cycle Recap
Last summer, I was going through a lot of emotional upheavals, and struggling to find a way to efficiently channel my feelings into something constructive. I had recently picked up journaling again, which I do consider a very cathartic exercise, but I was finding it too restrictive for the way I wanted to explore my experiences and emotions, so I returned to my love of poetry and decided to commit to a new project — something to pour my time into as a means of distracting myself from all of the noise in the world.
I have several projects swirling around my head at any given time: screenplays, libretti, poems, novels, etc., and I often find it difficult to seize and focus on just one. However, there was one idea that had been resurfacing time and again that I was eager to explore.
In 2022 or 2023, I discovered the term Sad Doll Disease…
The phrase stuck with me for years. I wanted to use the term as a metaphor for mental illness and intergenerational family trauma since they can spread from person to person the same way that the decaying plastic phenomenon can be transmitted from one infected doll to another, but I could never think of what exactly to do with it: a screenplay? a horror novel?
Growing up, I was obsessed with the antique dolls my grandmother collected, and this affinity was amplified when I learned as an adult that trans women are often called “dolls.” Around the same time I began conceptualizing this project, the “Protect the Dolls” movement gained viral momentum and everything sort of fell into place one autumn night in 2025.
It was a dark and stormy night during the Full Corn Moon…
and I was having a few inspirational cocktails at my favorite local horror-themed tavern when I had my coup de foudre moment: if “Sad Doll Disease” could explore mental health and trauma, why not go even deeper and focus specifically on the experiences of the dolls?
From that springboard, I developed the idea of a poetry chapbook that traces the life and eventual death of a trans woman, all playing out against shifting backdrops of rural gothic Americana. I chose to make it a sort of quasi-memoir, heavily influenced by my own experiences in a deindustrialized factory town in upstate New York.
As the autumn wore on and winter came, I found myself in a sort of literary renaissance: while I have been an avid writer since my childhood, I had been experiencing a period of writer’s block, floundering from idea to idea. After developing the concept for Sad Doll Disease, I felt spurred onward, excited to see how the idea took shape.
Poems poured out of me and, by the end of 2025, I made the commitment to begin submitting my work to publishing contests. While I had done so before, it was always sporadic, and usually only if a call for work I chanced upon perfectly aligned with something I already had in my repertoire. As 2026 quickly approached, I made the promise to myself to get my work out there more in the hopes of building up a body of work. With the arrival of the new year, I began sending out my submissions — pieces from Sad Doll Disease as well as unrelated pieces.
Now, a year later, I am so happy with where this journey has taken me. As of the date of this blog, I have had 20 pieces published across various websites, zines, journals, blogs, magazine, anthologies, and Substacks. A few weeks ago, I finished work on Sad Doll Disease and submitted it to several chapbook contests. While I wait for responses, I begin work on a new project.
This weekend marks exactly one year since I began down this new road in my writing career, and I cannot wait to see where it takes me next. When I noticed that last night was another Corn Moon, it felt like kismet — like I was exactly where I am supposed to be.
Stay tuned for upcoming publications, and be sure to check the calendar for upcoming events.
