I’ve had a pretty good few months, submission-wise, and I’ve been feeling like before my usual Christmas madness fully sets in—and certainly before I move on to another round of rolling the dice and anxiously awaiting responses—I really should stop and say thank you.

For the next little bit, then, I’m going to spotlight the publications that have recently made my day by giving my work some space in their pages, whether paper or digital. It’s my way of saying thank you, and also pointing you toward what I think are some great publications (and no, not just because they accepted my poems).

Each one has a distinctive character—a theme or a twist or something that sets it apart and makes for fantastic reading. All of them, as it happens, are done as a labor of love by individual editors and publishers, without backing from a university or other such.

First up: Hobo Camp Review.

Besides being fun to say (does anyone else remember Amy Sedaris as Jerri Blank saying, “hobo camp“?), this publication has a great concept: stories, poems, and essays that have the flavor of something that might be read down by the railroad tracks, around a trash-can fire. Dark, gritty … maybe a little smelly. Itinerant.

Even the information at Hobo Camp is fun to read because of its great voice and commitment to the theme. From the submission guidelines:

“While we like to envision Steinbeck, Li Po, McCullers, Bukowski, and Kerouac sitting around a campfire eating hot dogs and beans with a stray dog named Tom Waits wagging his tail at their feet, we don’t want a rehash. We’ve been eating hash here for months and we’re sick of it.”

I had a poem that was a bit of a hobo itself—I wrote it in 2009 and submitted it so many times, to so many places, and it always came limping back—and I love that it finally found a home at the Hobo Camp, in the Autumn 2013 issue.

Head hobo James H. Duncan is also an editor at Writer’s Digest and busy and successful with his own creative work, both poetry and prose. (Oh, and another thing about the collection of stories I’ve linked to—if you order it before Christmas 2013, you’ll help contribute to the Food Bank for New York City.)

If you visit Hobo Camp Review—and I hope you will—tell them FilthyJeans Sabrina sent you. They won’t know what you’re talking about, but I bet they’ll still share their mulligan stew. They’re good people that way.