Absolutely stunned that THE GETTYSBURG REVIEW has nominated my essay "Family Pictures" for a Pushcart. Speechless.

Publishing there was already amazing in itself.

Here's their announcement: "We are happy to announce our Pushcart Prize nominees. Visit our website to learn which pieces were nominated. Authors include: Andrew Koch, Rodney Gomez, Janice Obuchowski, Bruce Cohen, David Crouse, Jacqueline Doyle, Julia Drake, Albert Goldbarth, Jay Leeming, Rebecca McClanahan, Kathryn Nuernberger, Catherine Pierce, and J. Allyn Rosser." Their announcement on their blog specifies what stories, essays, and poems are being nominated (two by Rebecca McClanahan, one of my creative nonfiction heroes).

Just read proofs for my essay "Some Things I Forgot"  in ZONE 3, which should be out any day now. Another of those long shots (like THE GETTYSBURG REVIEW and NEW OHIO REVIEW). I'm really excited to be in this journal. They've just posted the above art by Hollie Chastain (the cover maybe?)

Just sent a submission to ATTICUS REVIEW yesterday, appending my micro "Leftovers" as something of an afterthought. It has had a LOT of rejections. I don't know where to send these very tiny pieces and was astonished to find an acceptance e-mail for "Leftovers" from them today! 

At my request (because I inexplicably failed to take any photos at all), Black Lawrence Press chapbook editor Kit Frick sent me a picture of the chapbook display at AWP18. (The book display was a large table to the left of it.) There it is, THE MISSING GIRL, second on the top row. The chapbook signing attracted a lot of readers, and BLP sold all but one copy by the end of the book fair.

The local indie bookstore, Books on B, has sold out, and just bought five more copies of THE  MISSING GIRL. Small numbers, but it's nice to know people are still reading it.

NOTHING SHORT OF: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story will be out in April but is already shipping. Pre-order here from the publisher Outpost 19 for $10 and free shipping.

My flashes "The Missing Girl" and "Zig Zag" have been named Finalists at BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2018, edited by Aimee Bender. They will be listed at the back of the book, along with 100 other finalists. Looking forward to reading all of them, and the anthology when it comes out. Given the thousands of flash that are published every year, this is quite an honor. "Zig Zag" won the flash and poetry contest at Midway Journal, judged by Michael Martone, earning me $500. "The Missing Girl" is the title flash in my chapbook.

​Unfortunately BEST SMALL FICTIONS did a poor job of informing writers. They sent an email saying you were a finalist but not for what story (I had three nominated) and also saying that you might be a winner but they wouldn't inform winners for several days. So I spent several days in a state of high anxiety checking my email repeatedly. Finally Twitter started to explode with writers announcing they were winners. It became apparent that I wasn't one. It took some of the luster off of being a finalist, which is an honor in itself but somehow no longer felt that way. At least at first.

Lots of flash writers I love among the winners: Lori Sambol Brody, Lydia Davis (!), Kathy Fish (for my favorite flash this year), Melissa Goode, Ashley Hutson, Meg Pokrass, Bud Smith, Jan Stinchcomb, Kaj Tanaka. Other writers I love that I don't associate with flash. Still others I've never heard of, some from print journals. And some finalists and semi-finalists I'd really have liked to see in the anthology (Cathy Ulrich, Jolene McIlwain, others). 

As usual, everything is happening at once, too much to post on social media, but I'll do it here.

Most exciting, an email from the Sherry Flick, the series editor of BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2018, saying one of my flash is a finalist. I won't know which one until March 23 (three were nominated, by Midway Journal and Black Lawrence Press). Finalists are listed at the back of the annual anthology. This is big news.

Today I have a new short story online at THE GINGER COLLECT, home for the "weird and strange." I've been working for a while on this story, strongly influenced by "The Yellow Wallpaper." The protagonist is a junior professor but she's nothing like me; I write about professors partly because it's so easy to imagine what they do. Here's "Raney's Imaginary Friend." A short interview will follow.

​p.s. Here's the interview.

The web edition table of contents was just posted, including a link to one of my two flash, "The Professor's Chair." Very proud to be in this magazine.

Ricky Moody: "I always read Post Road with great enthusiasm. In its stealthy, unassuming way, it has become one of the most reliable and ambitious literary magazines in America."
 
Amy Hempel: "The editors' enthusiasm is palpable; they consistently provide a lively home for writing worth reading."
 
Jonathan Ames: "they never fail to surprise, entertain, and enlighten"
 
Tom Perrotta: "one of the most interesting and exciting literary magazines out there"
 
Elizabeth Searle "Post Road maps the way to the freshest and funkiest literary territories"
 
Jonathan Lethem: "Post Road has the goods. I not only fall on them and read them like h ot news when they come in the door, I keep them lined up on my shelF like little books, because that's what they are."
 

Over the moon to have my flash featured on Mr. Bear’s renowned podcast at Boston Free Radio!!!

A few years ago Kathleen Rooney (founding editor of Rose Metal Press, which specializes in flash), interviewed Mr. Bear for AWP Writer and described the podcast: “Mr. Bear is the ideal reader, the kind of reader many authors either explicitly or unconsciously hope for when they sit down to write: someone discerning but generous, funny but sad, smart but not distant, who encounters literary work with a curious brain and an open heart, and who relishes the pieces that hit both places. He shares his readerly skills each week as the host of a show which airs every [week].
Each show is an eclectic musical-literary digest that chronicles the tastes and idiosyncrasies of this sophisticated stuffed animal and his owner Georgia Bellas, who received him as a present for her first birthday, and has had him with her ever since. … ‘I had an audience and platform so this could be an opportunity to shine a tiny spotlight on writers and artists and their work,’ said Bellas. ‘I wanted to let writers know their words had touched me and share those words with others who might not have heard them otherwise.’”
 
The latest episode of “Mr. Bear’s Violet Saloon/The Secret Lives of Stuffed Animals,” called “Chasing Rabbits” (show #165, March 11, 2018), opens with Grace Slick (Mr. Bear’s not old enough to know what that Jefferson Airplane song meant to me years ago) and features some of my most recent and some of my oldest flash. The music throughout is SO good. Here’s her description: “Show #165 on March 11, 2018…In which Mr. Bear reads the beguiling work of Jacqueline Doyle in FIVE:2:ONE, Spelk, A-Minor, 100 word story, Monkeybicycle, Flash Frontier, and Bluestem Magazine. New twists on Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood, mythological rivers, failed magicians, almost drownings — these stories blend ancient and modern magic, shining a sympathetic light on the human condition and elusiveness of dreams.” Download the free episode here or on iTunes.
 
Mr. Bear has included so many terrific flash writers over the seven years she’s been broadcasting. Check out the wonderful archives at PodBean. 

​One of the highlights of AWP in Tampa: seeing my lyric essay "Haunting Houses" for the first time in the brand new, hot-off-the-press issue of NOR: NEW OHIO and getting to talk to editor extraordinaire David Wanczyk (pictured above). 
 
Here’s an abbreviated list from Poets and Writers of the representative authors at NEW OHIO REVIEW: Kim Addonizio, Frederick Barthelme, Charles Baxter, Lydia Davis, Denise Duhamel, Stuart Dybek, Tony Hoagland (also in this issue), Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Pinsky, Francine Prose, Christopher Ricks, Mary Ruefle, Jim Shepard, Charles Simic, Christine Sneed. Tony Hoagland is in this issue. Kaj Tanaka. Billy Collins (my essay appears just before two of his poems).
 
I’m floored. 
 
I spent a lot of time at the book fair and also got to talk to Mark Drew, editor of THE GETTYSBURG REVIEW, where my essay “Family Pictures” appeared last summer, and he had very nice things to say about it. I got to chat to my editors Diane Goettel and Kit Frick at the BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS booth, where I did a well-attended chapbook signing on Thursday, and read to a packed house with seven other Press authors on Wednesday night. I didn’t take any pictures but maybe Black Lawrence Press will post some.
 
I met three friends face to face at AWP that I’ve only known online. I saw two old friends I rarely get to see. I hardly got to any panels, but was constantly busy anyway, and arrived home exhausted, rushing into the house to catch part of Mr. Bear’s podcast featuring my flash live from Boston Free Radio.
 
Yes! While I was away I discovered that Mr. Bear (aka writer Georgia Bellas) would be devoting an entire episode of her renowned weekly podcast on Boston Free Radio to my flash! It wouldn’t play on my smart phone, but it played on my computer. I got home in time to hear about two thirds of it. What a weird experience, hearing your work read. Mr. Bear chose some flash from way back, when I first started to publish, great music to accompany the flash. I can’t wait until the whole episode is archived online and I can listen to it. 

p.s. We didn't take any pictures but Catherine Segurson of CATAMARAN LITERARY READER just posted one she took of Steve and me. CATAMARAN is a gorgeous literary and art journal out of Santa Cruz where Steve and I published essays last summer. I'll be participating in a Lit Chat in Santa Cruz in April with one of their editors. The picture was taken after Steve's AWP reading celebrating the anthology WACCAMAW: A Ten Year Retrospective.

I'd forgotten I was in this anthology. My copy just arrived in the mail yesterday, though it's apparently been out for a while. Fairy Tales and Folkore Re-Imagined (St. Paul, MN: Between the Lines Publishing) includes my dark re-telling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses story and its possible aftermath.

You can buy the anthology at Amazon or read my story in Luna Station Quarterly where it first came out.