FASTEST AND SLOWEST ACCEPTANCES: NEW OHIO REVIEW AND ROUGAROU

​FOURTH GENRE sent four readers’ reports with their rejection of my essay “Haunting Houses,” two critiquing the collage of literary allusions and asking for more explicit connections. I didn’t want to fall into literary criticism—which I’m quite good at, after writing scholarly articles about literature for twenty years, but seems way too academic for this essay—so I wasn’t sure what to do. I tweaked the essay a little.
 
On January 24 I sent “Haunting Houses” to NOR: NEW OHIO REVIEW, one of my bucket list journals. On January 26, I got a note from their editor asking whether I’d be willing to work on the essay with them, rather quickly, for inclusion in their March issue. I said yes of course. I’m looking over their edits right now, and they look fine, mostly involve combining sections. I’ll say more about NOR and its colossally distinguished contributors when the issue comes out in March, but I couldn’t be more thrilled. Wow!

​​Sometimes my husband Steve and I write together under the name Alvarado O’Brien, though not for a while. We have a revised version of one of our co-productions coming out in a great anthology of collaborative writing next summer (THEY SAID), but some time last year he grandly proclaimed, “Alvarado O’Brien is dead.” Meanwhile on January 15, 2017 (yes, last year), I sent out the last of our collaborations. I forgot about it. It’s been more than a year. This morning I opened my email to find an acceptance from ROUGAROU, a cool magazine in Louisiana. They don’t mention how long it’s been, or when "One Night at the Crown Saloon" will come out, but “Long live Alvarado O’Brien!”

A rougarou, by the way, is sort of a werewolf, the French Cajun Louisiana version. Here's a picture from their website, artist unknown.