Amidst all the online hubbub about long essays, I have a tiny microfiction today at SIX SENTENCES. I just sent "Waterloo" to Rob McEvily yesterday. Publishing should always be so easy.

So excited and surprised. I wondered whether university-affiliated print magazines like PASSAGES NORTH would even manage to send copies to BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS, with everything so affected by the pandemic. This is an essay close to my heart, because it's one of the hybrid memoir/profile essays in my work-in-progress THE LUNATICS' BALL. My seventh Notable.

After putting together a submission for a magazine when their new call for submissions landed in my email inbox this morning, I discovered that they still have my submission from September 2020. If they're actively soliciting new work, they've obviously got staff (not sure everyone does, in COVID times). So is it time to ask what happened to my sub? That's the oldest, but I have two others from January and February 2021, both at prestigious magazines that have published me before! Doesn't make me feel particularly cherished that they're taking this long. I've decided to keep waiting on those, and ask about the September one. So hard deciding where to send things, whether to do simultaneous (I didn't for the February one, since they frown on it), how long to wait. This is also an exceptional year. I get that.

Changes soon at work and at home. Can't talk about the pending work changes yet, but our son found a studio apartment in San Francisco and will be moving out. We'll miss having him here, though he's just a short distance away. He's moved away and back home, away and home numerous times since he graduated high school, but it always makes us sad. 

A rejection of something I only sent to one place and I'm thinking I may retire. An acceptance at a cool online magazine of a reprint from a cool print magazine. They don't want me to announce it until their submission period is over, but I'm pleased. I wanted this one to be available online, and it seems a perfect fit.

The announcement for my September 17-19 Bending Genres workshop just went up. You can register here. 

​At last! My contributor’s copy of SONORA REVIEW arrived in the mail, with a flash from my WIP (The Lunatics’ Ball): “Charcot’s Monkey.” I can’t wait to read this beautiful issue! The magazine should be for sale on their website later this month.

It's official. I just sent off the description for the Bending Genres workshop I'll be teaching in September. Very relieved to hear from Robert Vaughan that they have a great IT guy who actually designs the course. So now I just have to put the teaching materials together and teach it.

LOOKING SIDEWAYS: Oblique Approaches to Generating and Focusing Your Flash Nonfiction, September 17-19
Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola take the title of their creative nonfiction textbook from Emily Dickinson: “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” In this prompt-based weekend workshop, you will generate new creative nonfiction flash by looking sideways at the past and telling it slant. We’ll use exercises, objects, clothing, and photographs to access what you’ve forgotten, and new forms to approach what you remember well but can’t seem to write. This workshop is for writers who are stuck, for writers who feel they have no life experiences worth writing about, for writers who feel they don’t remember enough to write nonfiction, and also for writers who feel they remember too much to write flash. This is for writers at all levels, including flash fiction writers looking for resonant material. Surprise yourself with memories you didn’t know you had, and forms you haven’t tried before.

Just as I'm getting depressed and anxious (mostly about COVID and trying to second guess what new precautions we should take, but about the incoherence of The Lunatics' Ball, about the incessant barking of the neighbor's dog, about new health problems, you name it, I have a long list), I go and accept an invitation to read. Let's hope I'm in a better mood on Friday, September 3, 4pm PDT, 7pm EST, when I'll read again in the FBomb NY Flash Fiction Reading Series, which used to be in the KGB Bar (picture below) but now is via Zoom.

My Poe-inspired story (yes, another one) "The Leaf Blower" was just accepted at POTATO SOUP JOURNAL, which has published all kinds of great writers. I'm really pleased to be published there. It will be out September 2. Of the five or six genres I write in (personal essay, narrative nonfiction, lyric essay, cnf flash, flash fiction, fiction), fiction is what I write least often, but lately I've been on a roll. 

And a fellow contributor at SONORA REVIEW (who turns out to be a cnf reader at CRAFT) got her copy in the mail. It exists! It's in the mail! I'll post her picture of the magazine here.

The wonderful Jayne Martin did a great profile of me in the fourth issue of the print magazine THE SAN FRANCISCAN, and they just posted it online:  "Missing Girls, Hidden Women." I love the original art by Tess Powell.

The print issue is now available in a lot of Bay Area bookstores. In addition to great articles, there's a short story by Ethel Rohan, and flash by Kara Vernor, Thaisa Frank, Robert Scotellaro, and Lynn Mundell. 

​And here it is, front and center, at GREEN APPLE BOOKS IN THE PARK.