Thrilled to hear from Robert Erle Barham at CURRENT that they have nominated my short essay "Shoplifting" for BEST OF THE NET.

My (very) short story "Petey's Own Personal Jesus" is out in ROI FAINEANT PRESS today!

BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS just wrote to inform us that Will McMillan's essay "How We Carry the Weight of It" will be listed as a Notable in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2024, out next month. I love Will's essay and feel very honored that CRAFT has been awarded five Notables in the four years since we started publishing CNF.

An invite from Francine Witte to read on September 21 in the online reading series she co-curates with Meg Pokrass, The Prose Garden. Looking forward to it.

Steve's reading in the Lyric and Dirges series at Pegasus Books in Berkeley in a couple of weeks. Then doing a fancy reading at Chico State in October, where he'll also visit a class. We'll spend a couple more days in the area. Should be a nice getaway.

later: Bummer. I had to pull out of the Prose Garden series because of a memorial service we're going to (two in one week: the mother of one our son's friends, the father of a former student of ours. Both alcoholism-related deaths.

I've been working hard on two projects for CRAFT: an interview with our contest judge Donald Quist, coming out in December, and an interview with Naomi Cohn, coming out in March.

Donald Quist is the founder of PAST TEN; the current editor (his writer-wife Bailey Gaylin Moore) solicited an essay from me for PAST TEN and I became interested in the project and his writing. An assistant professor at University of Missouri, he's published fiction and a collection on popular culture, and two books of essays, HARBORS and TO THOSE BOUNDED. I've been assembling questions together with our other CNF editor, which is more difficult than I thought it would be. I'm used to working on my own.

Our EIC forwarded an invitation from Rose Metal Press to interview Naomi Cohn. I fell in love with her forthcoming book THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA, a hybrid (braided?) text composed of alphabetized fragments (vignettes?). I love the indeterminate genre, what she calls "organized chaos" and a "poetic mess." Love the lyricism of her prose. I probably shouldn't be committing myself to a project that's bound to be time-consuming, but it may be inspiring for my own work as well. 

Really enjoyed reading ("Because I Could Not Stop for Death" and "Crazy Jane's Cup of Tea") in Jon Sindell's beautiful garden in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco. Steve chose Crazy Jane from a list of very short flash that I was considering and it turned out to be fun to read. I think I wrote it back when I envisioned THE LUNATICS' BALL as combining flash fiction and flash nonfiction. ("Let us imagine," Virginia Woolf said, "since facts are hard to come by." Or something like that.) I learned from Elaine Showalter's book on women and madness that Crazy Jane was a stock character in poetry and the visual arts before Yeats wrote about her. And that there were indeed itinerant lunatics in Ireland in the nineteenth century.

All of the readers were great (unusual for me to like all of the writing in a reading), and the music was great too. I love having the opportunity to read outdoors in the Rolling Writers series, which meets only twice a year now. We managed to find a tapas restaurant with outdoor seating in Burlingame on the way home. 

Attaching a photo where you don't get the full effect of the garden, which is gorgeous.

A nice evening. I taught Grant's accountability class for him, and this is the first time that the technology of hosting his Zoom group has gone perfectly smoothly. I'm also getting to know the other participants and I like them a lot. 

​When class was over I opened my email to an acceptance from Roi Fainéant Press of "Petey's Own Personal Jesus." I don't publish all that many short stories; this will be my first in 2024. I loved writing the dialogue in this one.

I also have a forthcoming reprint of "Doppler Effect" in a really cool anthology curated by Amy Marques, who embeds each piece in print/painted collages. Not sure when DUETS REDUX is coming out, but I already had a peek at my page and it's beautiful. I love the first DUETS and the collages she has published online.

Twitter/X changed its algorithms again and writers are complaining that they can't find their content. UK flash writer Matt Kendrick suggested that flash writers should flood the site with their favorite flash, labeling their posts #flashyfaves and it's been a lot of fun reading them. I was really gratified to find a couple of mine in the rapidly growing list. Jupiter Jones recommended "(Parenthetical Asides)"; Kathy Fish recommended "Because I Could Not Stop for Death"; and Will Woolfitt, who teaches at Lee University, said that he's teaching that one, along with several others by great flash writers, in his class. I'm honored. I haven't been writing much flash, absorbed as I am in assembling THE LUNATICS' BALL, and it's encouraging to hear that other writers like and remember my work. Grant Faulkner also added "Little Darling" to the mix in his Facebook comment.

Addendum: And Tommy Dean recommended "The Madwoman on BART" as one of his #flashyfaves. Doubly pleased because "(Parenthetical Asides")" and "The Madwoman on BART" are both part of THE LUNATICS' BALL.

Big thanks to Renee Rettig, proprietor of Books on B, for throwing such a great book launch, reading and q&a, and 65th birthday party for Steve. It was a blast and I have way too many photos to share here, but still not of everyone. And since I couldn't find a good one of Renee, I snapped one in the bookstore yesterday. I'll start with that, and the Tres Leches cake (somehow didn't manage a photo of the great Mexican food), and the temporary tattoos Renee surprised us with. She also surprised us with music, a playlist she solicited from our son Ben in Vietnam.

Today is Steve's 65th birthday (we're going to eat on the patio at The Wolf in Oakland, first time we've tried it) and Sunday we'll celebrate his birthday and his brand new novella CAPTAIN CHICANO DRAWS A LINE IN THE AMERICAN SAND at our favorite indie bookstore, Books on B in Hayward. Order on Amazon or from the University of Tampa Press. The launch party and reading at the bookstore is free but you need a ticket and it has already sold out! We haven't had a party this big for over ten years (when we had a DJ and catered barbecue and tons of people at our house for Steve's "almost 50" 49th birthday). Luckily the wonderful Renée Rettig at Books on B seems to have plans well in hand. The book dropped August 15 and his copies have arrived and they've arrived in the bookstore. So that's major.