acceptance from ghost proposal

Thrilled that my weird lyric essay "Visitations" (segmented, almost short enough to be a flash) has been accepted by GHOST PROPOSAL, the perfect magazine for it. Love their genre-crossing experimental aesthetic.

The editor-in-chief Naomi Washer did a post at ESSAY DAILY reflecting on the magazine after the publication of the fifth issue. Their mission:

"Proposal: an offering; a possibility; a conjecture; a guess; a hypothesis; a thing-to-be-explored. 
Ghost: a shadow on the sleeve of your sweater; a rhythm returning from lifetimes before; the meandering suggestion of a river on an ancient, yellowed map. 
We want to publish your strange objects. The whispers sitting in between your shoulder blades." 

They've published beautiful essays by Jill Talbot, B.J. Hollars, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Brian Doyle, Brian Oliu Emma Bolden, many others. 

​Here's one of their covers that I particularly like (issue 4, I don't see a photographer listed):

Some of the same obsessions that I explore in one of my recent Lunatics flash (when I discovered that Madeline, one of the mental patients in Jon Crispin's  "Willard Suitcases" photo installation, lived just 30 miles away from me when I was in grad school at Cornell) and in the flash essay coming out in SWEET, make their appearance in "Visitations" as well: the T.S. Eliot postcard from Margate that I looked at in the Rare Book Room at Cornell, lines from "The Waste Land" that continue to haunt me, and the connections between Poe and Eliot (half of my 600-page dissertation really, but in particular lines from the wife in "The Waste Land" and the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart"). It will be weird if the essays in SWEET and GHOST PROPOSAL come out at the same time, which they might.

I've only sent a handful of submissions to GHOST PROPOSAL in the past, but "Little Colored Pills," the fractured lyric flash coming out in SWEET, is one that they rejected!

I'm forging ahead, writing more flash for the Lunatics project, but feeling very ambivalent about the incoherence of marrying fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography. This was supposed to be a chapbook, but it's turning into something bigger, a mess right now. Rebecca Makaii just posted something on twitter that sums up my feelings: "The two biggest problems with starting a new book are that either you can see the platonic ideal whole so perfectly that you don't want to mess it up by beginning, or that you CAN'T see the whole thing, so you don't believe in it enough to begin."