BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS NOTABLES!!!

Every year at this time it's the same scramble. The only way to find out who's on the long list of Notable Essays at the back of BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS is to get on the Amazon site and use the Look Inside feature. Most frustrating, there are often pages missing, so essayists who fall in the wrong part of the alphabet have to wait until the book comes out in early October.

This year is AMAZING. Not only did I get a Notable Essay listing (my third, each as exciting as the first), but Steve did too! A Notable is such an honor, and so encouraging. And my good friend, the very talented Alia Volz, has a Notable and an essay actually included the anthology! 

The essayist Steven Church said online that the Notables season always feels like Christmas in September. This year it definitely does.

Here are the links to my essay ("A Eulogy, Despite" in FULL GROWN PEOPLE) and Steve's ("The Case for Steve Gutierrez" in WACCAMAW), which both happen to be in online journals.

​Perhaps because of the general celebratory atmosphere, the hyperlink feature on the blog seems to work again. We didn't do anything to fix it.

Alia took pictures of our pages, so here they are:

And I just got a check for $500 for winning the chapbook contest at Black Lawrence Press, enclosed in a card with a warm handwritten note from the publisher. I don't see how this day can get any better. (My horoscope in the local newspaper this morning gave my day only two stars out of a possible five. Proving their inaccuracy once again.)
​