Just finished up with the CATAPULT editors, who really went over the flash with a fine tooth comb, and the 200 words I added with a fine tooth comb, and only came up with two tiny questions/changes. It's going to be published on Tuesday. I'd rather it was later, because my lyric essay in THE CAFE IRREAL will be published on Sunday. And the NEW WORLD WRITING story was just published last week. I worry that my readers will get tired of seeing my name and decide not to read one of these. All very different, very much the range of what I write.

A tiny, philosophical micro that I guess I'll call nonfiction for the premier issue of a new journal featuring "hybrid, short-form prose and prose poems" called RAN OFF WITH THE STAR BASSOON. I like the name, and the art. An amazing run of acceptances lately. Pinch me.

"The Blue-Haired Woman on the Polish Freighter" is here! NEW WORLD WRITING is a magazine I've been trying to get into forever.

I just finished revising my flash "The Peak of His Powers" yesterday and I sent it to two places. In their automated response, BULL said they were backed up and wouldn't get back to me for 3-4 months. So I was particularly thrilled to get an acceptance from them 20 hours later. ("Really dug these--love a good ironic rant. I think the first one hits the note especially well and I'd love to publish it here at BULL in the next couple months.") Their subject is men ("the evolution of modern masculinity"), they publish some really great fiction, I'm looking forward to publishing there, and glad it will be a couple of months, since I suddenly have so much coming out. Glad to hear also that they liked the other one, a 100-word story I've been worried about placing. Great news to wake up to on a sunny Sunday morning!

​An exciting surprise today!!! I don’t know how many years I’ve been sending submissions to Frederick Barthelme’s magazine NEW WORLD WRITING. A decade maybe? Since before they changed their name (from BLIP). So I’m bowled over by their acceptance of my story “The Blue-Haired Woman on the Polish Freighter,” a hybrid blend of fiction, fiction in the form of memoir, and memoir in the form of fiction that was great fun to write. It should be posted any time now. Hooray!

Which I was expecting a year ago, maybe even spring 2020, has written once again to say it might be in the mail, but might not be yet, and it's printed, but not all copies are printed, and the university is going to send copies, so they're not really sure when, but soon. I wish they'd do a cover reveal! But it won't be for sale until the end of August, so maybe I won't post it until then anyway. I've been in some other print magazines during the pandemic (Fourth Genre anyway, Passages North may have been before that) and somehow they managed. But I don't know how. I don't think there's much on-ground staff at my university. So I sympathize.

The kind folks at NUNUM interviewed me last March and the interview went live today. (I had just reread Calvino's Invisible Cities; my lyric essay about that experience will come out in The Cafe Irreal in two weeks. And I'd just purchased Jo Ann Beard's Festival Days; I'm reading the last essay in the collection right now. Both stunning books.)

Loved the Bending Genres workshop with Meg Tuite this weekend. The readings really blew my mind, and I wrote two pieces I would never have written otherwise. Trying to push language to be more alliterative and musical, I tried a riff for The Lunatics' Ball on the second day about an 1879 fire at Blackwell's Asylum and I'm pleased with the result. I want more lyric pieces in the collection, and it definitely needs some lighter ones.

The first day of Meg Tuite's class ("Plundering Hybrids: Variety in Verbiage That Shakes Sentence Foundation, Cuts Through the Narrative Shortcut to Nowhere!") and my mind is blown. Reading Garielle Lutz for the first time, who's very influenced by Gordon Lish's sentence poetics (I remember how completely jazzed Steve was when he took a class from Lish years ago). Can I manage the level of analysis within the sentence that he does? Instead of finding out, I took a grand detour inspired by a line in one of Meg's prompts ("Let each sentence ride its own bus"). But it was fun. Looking forward to tomorrow.

And I managed to finish a draft for Catapult with exactly 200 more words (the limit they suggested). Still not sure about one addition, but I'll have something to send to them by their Monday deadline.

Wow, just wow! I sent my nonfiction flash "Mid-Century Modern" to CATAPULT last October, and when I didn't hear from them, I figured they were one of those magazines that doesn't bother to send rejections. Today they accepted it!

They want some edits. That is, they've done slight copyedits to what's there, but want me to develop it more (up to 200 words more) and gave me a deadline of Monday, Which isn't great, because I'm taking Meg Tuite's workshop at Bending Genres this weekend. At least I'm up to date with CRAFT (did edits on two micros Sunday, have an introduction ready for tomorrow, have finished all my current reading assignments and can postpone new reading assignments until next week). I'll make it work.

Driving into San Francisco tomorrow night for the first in-person meeting of my writing group The Leporine Conspiracy since February 2020. 

The "Immersive Van Gogh" installation in San Francisco yesterday was very cool!