PS Conway

Oh How I Love a Good Proverb

Salutations, my digital friends. It has been a few months since I last posted, and I did not want you to think I had fallen off a cliff in Ireland. Again. Save that story for another day.

But, oh, how I do love a good proverb.

Especially one that starts with idle hands and, within two verses, has essentially accused you of gossip, corruption, and part-time employment in the devil’s regional office.

It’s the sort of phrase designed to make a person feel morally suspect for sitting still too long with a cup of coffee, an overdue email, and a mind already halfway to perdition.

The trouble, of course, is that my hands have not been idle (he said, removing them from his trousers). Not even slightly.

While I may have gone quiet here for a spell, I have been out in the world making the usual authorial mischief: doing interviews, turning up at media events, and somehow continuing to place my words in actual publications despite my ribald personality.

So before anyone reports me to the infernal foreman, I thought I’d offer a proper update from the workshop.

And the Lord said, Go Forth and Be Perceived

The workshop has not been entirely private.

I have also been shuffling out into the world of interviews, podcasts, and literary conversation, which remains a strange way to make a living given my face, my temperament, and my general disdain for being seen. I weep for this generation’s pathological need to be seen.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Steve Cuden for his most excellent podcast StoryBeat, and I am delighted to report that I managed to sound more or less sentient for the duration. That episode airs April 21, 2026, should you wish to hear me masquerade as a serious Literatus in real time: https://www.storybeat.net/

My interview with Gabriela Marie Milton, Editor-in-Chief of Literary Revelations Publishing House, is also now live. Gabriela asked thoughtful questions, which is always dangerous, and somehow I emerged with my mystique mostly intact: https://literaryrevelations.com/2026/01/25/the-portrait-of-a-poet-ps-conway/

And in a further moment of revelatory brilliance, I joined author Tricia Copeland on her podcast Finding the Magic Book, which is now available to watch. So if you have ever wanted visual confirmation that I do, in fact, exist outside of sarcasm and semicolons (but no em dashes – EVER!), here you are: https://youtu.be/NhieYECI-H4

And the Word Was Made Flesh, and Published in Belfast

It has, against all odds, after a life of sin and depravity, been a fruitful few months on the poetry front.

Four recent poems have found kind and discerning homes in journals I deeply admire, which remains one of the stranger mercies of this writing life. You labor in solitude, muttering to yourself and rearranging a single adjective for half an afternoon, and then one day an editor in another corner of the world says, yes, this one. It never stops feeling a little miraculous. Praise be.

My poem mercy will appear in The Ekphrastic Review on May 12. As many of you know, they are a respected online journal devoted entirely to writing inspired by visual art, and I am genuinely delighted to have the poem appear there. Their devotion to the conversation between image and language makes them a natural home for work that wants to look hard at beauty and let beauty look back.

My poem the color of staying appeared in the Spring 2026 edition of PHIL LIT Journal on March 15. I have great affection for what this journal is doing in the world, publishing work that engages philosophical, metaphysical, ethical, and existential questions while still honoring beauty, craft, surprise, and risk. In other words, they remain gloriously unwilling to choose between thought and lyric fire.

And I am also honored to have two poems, paint and i have seen love do the same, featured in The Belfast Review, Winter/Spring 2026. Based in the north of Ireland, this gorgeous emerging magazine creates a lively dialogue between the arts and welcomes forms not always invited into more traditional literary rooms. It feels expansive, alert, and deeply alive to the many ways art enters the self and the city.

There is no cool way to say this, so I won’t try: I am grateful. Poetry remains the quieter room in my house of writing, but it is often the room where the truest things wait. The devil is scared shitless to interfere with my Muses… they have after all been around much longer. Hehe.

And Lo, the Devil’s Workshop Filed for Bankruptcy

So there you have it: a few months of apparent silence that were, in truth, full of interviews, poems, and the usual dubious bargains required to keep a writer shambling forward.

I may have gone quiet here for a spell, but quiet and idle have never been the same thing.

If anything, these last months have reminded me that the work goes on whether or not one is publicly narrating it. Poems find their homes. Conversations happen. Strange and lovely doors open. And every so often, despite my best efforts, I remain both visible and validated.

So no, I have not disappeared. I have simply been down in the workshop, sleeves rolled, soul slightly singed, trying to make something worth your time.

Until next time, then — stay busy, stay strange, and should the devil come looking for your idle hands, tell him you’ve already put them to better use. *WINK*

Namaste.