An update on Bad Lilies

Dear readers of Bad Lilies,

Our latest offering, issue nineteen, marks our third anniversary as a digital poetry journal. We started out in April 2021, in the middle of a national lockdown during the Covid pandemic, and we’ve been putting out issues every two months since. As of writing, we have had some 81,000 unique visitors to Bad Lilies. Almost half of our readership is international, with around a quarter of our visits coming from the United States and Canada. All told we have published 270 contributors (that’s with some double or triple counting for those who have appeared in our pages more than once) and more poems than we have the time to count.

Having the time to produce Bad Lilies has been much on our minds of late. Both the florists of Bad Lilies currently work full-time jobs, and editing the journal has very much been a labour of love in our off hours. What was easier when we were all shut at home weathering the storm of Covid in 2021 is much harder now it is 2024. With success in building up a readership comes an ever-increasing number of submissions, and we lack a platform like Submittable to make the job of considering poems easier. We receive no funding and so far we have not asked for any. We’re also conscious that Bad Lilies could actually go much further. We have considered branching out into physical pamphlets, for example. But all this would take time and energy we can’t currently manage.

So, we have come to a decision. Having reached our third anniversary, Bad Lilies is going to take a holiday. We will be going on hiatus for the rest of 2024, to recharge our batteries and take stock of where we should take the journal in the future. Please stay tuned for news of a submission window later in the year, and for news of our exciting plans for 2025 and beyond. In the meantime, there is a wealth of poetry to visit and revisit across the pages of Bad Lilies. We shall return…

Yours,
Kathryn Gray and Andrew Neilson