WHEN you come to Fairbanks, Alaska, visit the waste transfer sites. Fairbanks has several, each with a similar layout: large open lots located near main roads. This time of year, you won’t see them from the roadway. They’re surrounded first by chain-link fences and then obscured by the extravagant foliage of the birch, willow, aspen, and spruce trees. Almost every household outside of the city limits hauls its own waste. My husband usually drops off the trash on his way into town before work. There’s no leaving it in his truck bed and waiting until evening; the ravens would root through the bags and leave a terrible mess behind.
But this August morning I’ll take the trash instead. I need to drive to town anyway, to use the internet. Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is opening its submission portal to unagented poetry manuscripts and will cap entries at three hundred submissions. There’s no way my home internet can upload my manuscript in a timely manner. On a good day, our DSL connection achieves a 2.5 Mbps download and 0.7 Mbps upload speed. Today is not a good internet day. Using my cell phone as a hot spot isn’t an option either.
I live a few miles outside
