acceptance from tiny molecules

 The past week has brought some unwelcome rejections (are rejections ever welcome?) of  two flash I wrote in the Kathy Fish Fast Flash class, so I was particularly happy to wake up to an acceptance of my segmented flash "Still Lives" from TINY MOLECULES this morning. "Still Lives" started when I saw the Edvard Munch exhibit at SFMOMA (several years ago?) as a possible chapbook idea: a series of ekphrastic flash on artists and models. I decided to get rid of a lot of accumulated research and distill it down to a flash about two artists (Munch, Picasso) and two writers (Poe, Browning).

Connor Harrison solicited me for TINY MOLECULES' new feature "Observations" after three of my Lunatics flash were published in their fiction section. "Observations" calls for "explorations of, and responses to, art [and] reading," among other things, and seemed like a good fit. Their examples are intriguing: Anne Carson's Plainwater, Gertrude Stein's Food, John Berger's and our faces, my heart, brief as photos." It was the only place I sent "Still Lives." Publication should always be this painless and easy.

I was pleased to see that TINY MOLECULES has a former contributor in the Wigleaf Top 50, and twelve former contributors on the Wigleaf longlist. A nice magazine!

​I'm sort of thrown off my stride with the other two flash. One was rejected by someone I consider a (virtual) friend. I even blurbed her book. So I feel like it must be nowhere near as good as I thought, and I don't want to send it to another editor I consider a (virtual) friend, whose championing of "Nola" led to THE MISSING GIRL. Not sure where to send them. The literary world shrinks  rather than expanding as I know more editors.

Of course I know from CRAFT that many of the flash we reject end up in very good magazines, and many factors go into a rejection. Doesn't lessen the blow, really.

And I miscalculated by sending my lyric essay on rereading Italo Calvino to a place that doesn't accept simultaneous submissions. They just wrote to me that they won't make a decision until July (I sent it in mid-April, and never imagined it would take this long). In the meantime I discovered several good magazines that are specifically looking for lyric essays. Oh well. I have more than one. We'll be talking about my lyric essay on Joseph Cornell in my writing group tomorrow night. I'm thinking about expanding a short philosophical riff that just got two rejections into a short lyric essay as well.