Thrilled to hear from Robert Erle Barham at CURRENT that they have nominated my short essay "Shoplifting" for BEST OF THE NET.

My (very) short story "Petey's Own Personal Jesus" is out in ROI FAINEANT PRESS today!

BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS just wrote to inform us that Will McMillan's essay "How We Carry the Weight of It" will be listed as a Notable in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2024, out next month. I love Will's essay and feel very honored that CRAFT has been awarded five Notables in the four years since we started publishing CNF.

An invite from Francine Witte to read on September 21 in the online reading series she co-curates with Meg Pokrass, The Prose Garden. Looking forward to it.

Steve's reading in the Lyric and Dirges series at Pegasus Books in Berkeley in a couple of weeks. Then doing a fancy reading at Chico State in October, where he'll also visit a class. We'll spend a couple more days in the area. Should be a nice getaway.

later: Bummer. I had to pull out of the Prose Garden series because of a memorial service we're going to (two in one week: the mother of one our son's friends, the father of a former student of ours. Both alcoholism-related deaths.

I've been working hard on two projects for CRAFT: an interview with our contest judge Donald Quist, coming out in December, and an interview with Naomi Cohn, coming out in March.

Donald Quist is the founder of PAST TEN; the current editor (his writer-wife Bailey Gaylin Moore) solicited an essay from me for PAST TEN and I became interested in the project and his writing. An assistant professor at University of Missouri, he's published fiction and a collection on popular culture, and two books of essays, HARBORS and TO THOSE BOUNDED. I've been assembling questions together with our other CNF editor, which is more difficult than I thought it would be. I'm used to working on my own.

Our EIC forwarded an invitation from Rose Metal Press to interview Naomi Cohn. I fell in love with her forthcoming book THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA, a hybrid (braided?) text composed of alphabetized fragments (vignettes?). I love the indeterminate genre, what she calls "organized chaos" and a "poetic mess." Love the lyricism of her prose. I probably shouldn't be committing myself to a project that's bound to be time-consuming, but it may be inspiring for my own work as well. 

Really enjoyed reading ("Because I Could Not Stop for Death" and "Crazy Jane's Cup of Tea") in Jon Sindell's beautiful garden in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco. Steve chose Crazy Jane from a list of very short flash that I was considering and it turned out to be fun to read. I think I wrote it back when I envisioned THE LUNATICS' BALL as combining flash fiction and flash nonfiction. ("Let us imagine," Virginia Woolf said, "since facts are hard to come by." Or something like that.) I learned from Elaine Showalter's book on women and madness that Crazy Jane was a stock character in poetry and the visual arts before Yeats wrote about her. And that there were indeed itinerant lunatics in Ireland in the nineteenth century.

All of the readers were great (unusual for me to like all of the writing in a reading), and the music was great too. I love having the opportunity to read outdoors in the Rolling Writers series, which meets only twice a year now. We managed to find a tapas restaurant with outdoor seating in Burlingame on the way home. 

Attaching a photo where you don't get the full effect of the garden, which is gorgeous.