Somehow I managed to write three flash in the three-day Kathy Fish Fast Flash Reunion Extravaganza this weekend, while doing a bunch of other things, including a potluck in Livermore (okay, we didn't cook the vegetarian lasagna ourselves) and a party in Marin (at Cristina Garcia's for her upcoming play). I was hoping to start a lyric essay (two of the prompts would have worked) but characters' voices kept intruding. The third prompt, where we were supposed to thread facts through a narrative,  turned out to be the basis for all the lobotomy research I've been doing for the Lunatics project. It's grim, maybe the darkest of all the ones I've written, but I'm so glad to have a structure for what I'm going to do with it.

And one of my lyric essays came out today, in a journal I love, GHOST PROPOSAL. Here’s their description of the magazine:

“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. At Ghost Proposal, we’re into writing that is aware of its own topography. We like work that engages with thought process. We think of writing as ‘a letter from a stranger that you can’t bear to throw away. It haunts you; it strengthens you.’ (Mary Oliver). We want to publish your strange objects. The whispers sitting in between your shoulder blades.”

It's the perfect place for my essay "Visitations," comprised of whispers and hauntings and memories and wanderings.

​Love the cover art by  Kailey Barthel.

Thrilled that my flash essay “Dear Maddy” won the essay contest at THE SUNLIGHT PRESS! I submitted a couple of months ago. They accepted it, saying it was still in the running for the contest, and I forgot all about it. So it came as a wonderful surprise. The contest was free (contests rarely are) and I’ve won $125..
 
I first came across THE SUNLIGHT PRESS when Claire Polders published there. Sudha Balagopal has also published there, and Cathy Ulrich (who won a contest).
 
“Dear Maddy” went through many revisions. It started with the Sherwood Anderson allusion, which my writing group advised ​taking out, which I did for a while, and then I put it back in, but I had so much trouble wording it, and landing in the right place at the end.

Hooray! An acceptance of one of my favorite flash, from PITHEAD CHAPEL, a magazine I really admire, from their fiction editor Kim Magowan, a writer I really admire (I just read her story collection UNDOING and loved it).

So excited to be part of the FLASH FLOOD JOURNAL celebration of National Flash Fiction Day in the UK. The reprint of my story “Little Darling” from WIGLEAF went up this morning. The deluge started hours ago and continues all day long (new flash every 5-10 minutes!) Take some time to browse! Here’s the ongoing NATIONAL FLASH FICTION DAY site and twitter feed.