So excited that SUPERSTITION REVIEW has published my lyric essay “Fireflies.” I’ve wanted to get into SUPERSTITION REVIEW for ages. They’ve featured formidable writers such as Brian Doyle, Teresa Svoboda, David Lazar, Brenda Miller, Ira Sukrungruang, Molly Giles, Rigoberto Gonzalez, the late Michael Harper (a former teacher of mine), the late Judith Ortiz Cofer (whom I just wrote about for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies), and so many others. I’m thrilled to be in their pages. The essay began in Mark Doty’s generative workshop on the lyric essay at Writers by Writers @Tomales Bay, and has gone through numerous transformations since that time. This is also the longest recording I’ve ever done, with the trusty Garage Band feature on my Mac. I’m getting better at it, though you’re not going to mistake me for a professional.
 
The circulation figures for online magazines, well-established ones anyway,  still boggle my mind. SUPERSTITION REVIEW reaches about 30,000 readers.

Oh, and they always have great covers. Love the cover art by John Sproul.

Wonderful reading tonight ("Women, Forgotten and Remembered: An Evening of Poetry") with Susan Cohen, Jodi Hottel, Teresa Poore, Susan Terris, Jeanne Wagner, and poet and organizer Kathleen McClung. Thank you, Kathleen, and Joseph Dellert, owner of The Artisans Gallery in San Francisco! Great audience, great poems. 

I just signed a contract for two flash to be published next fall in POST ROAD. I think this is the first time I've been paid (at least the first time I've been paid well) for flash. (And I love the magazine.)  

Correction, 4-24-17: THREADCOUNT just paid me too (they don't mention that in their guidelines, and I didn't expect it). Thank you, POST ROAD and THREADCOUNT!

Somehow it always happens that everything comes out at once. Two publications coming out online on May 1. A weird hybrid flash on Poe and Dostoevsky coming out in THREADCOUNT. And a lyric essay coming out in SUPERSTITION REVIEW.

I'm floored to be in all three of these really fine magazines, all particular favorites of mine.

I'll be reading on Thursday, April 27, 7pm, at The Artisans, 2549 Irving St. (@27th Ave), San Francisco, along with six poets: Kathleen McClung (who put together the reading), Jodi Hottel, Teresa Poore, Susan Terris, Jeanne Wagner, and Susan Cohen. Here are directions.

"Women, Forgotten and Remembered" will mark the Bay  Area launch for Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry, edited by Ginny Lowe Connors, introduction by Marilyn Kallett (Grayson Books, 2017). I'll be reading my poem "Practicing Self-Reliance," about the largely voiceless women behind the New England Transcendentalists, and a prose poem/flash sequence about Freud's "Dora" (who suffered from hysterical aphonia, or loss of voice). Steve will read the sections from the Freud case study, as I verbalize Ida-Dora's reactions.

Here's the Facebook event page, Ida Bauer (who looks ready to take on Freud), and Kathleen with the book. Would love to see some friends there!

It's arrived! Got home tonight to find my contributor's copy of ROOTED in the mailbox. ROOTED: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction, edited by Josh MacIvor-Anderson, with an introduction by the renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben, is a beautiful collection, filled with luminaries from the world of literary essays (Brian Doyle, Steven Church, Lia Purpura, Matthew Gavin Frank, Paul Lisicky, among others), along with lesser known writers like me. The San Francisco publisher, Outpost 19, has put together a website for the book; in addition to purchasing information, there's an ongoing section for readers' writing on trees, and a supplement to the anthology with background on the essays and a compilation of writing prompts from the contributors (me included).

I read my essay "Saving Trees" from the anthology tonight at the wonderful Moshin Literary  Salon at the Moshin Vineyards and Winery in Healdsburg, curated by Marcy Gordon of Writing Between the Vines (above on the right). Great audience! Great fellow readers! Loved Grace Hwang Lynch's memoir-essay (partly about a winery) and my friend Monica Nolan's novel chapter (partly about foodies in Marin).

Monica and Alia Volz and I were awarded a Writing Between the Vines writing residency at Inman Winery last spring. Grace is doing a residency this week at Moshin Winery through the same program. Applications are closed for this year, but check them out next year. It was amazingly productive, and a stunningly beautiful place.

Black Lawrence Press has my book page up! My chapbook THE MISSING GIRL is available now for PRE-ORDER: $8.95 if you wait until September, $6.95 if you order the chapbook in advance. I can't say enough wonderful things about Black Lawrence and their chapbook editor Kit Frick. They're the best.