Little fiction/Big truths & Irish Crossroads event

LITTLE FICTION/BIG TRUTHS just announced the writers they'll include in their special issue on Flash Fiction. I'm so excited to be on this list, and to see that I know and love  pretty much all of these writers. In fact I've met two of them (Claire Polders and Tommy Dean) in person. Their Flash Nonfiction issue last summer was great. I loved every single flash. Can't wait for this one, which I thought was going to be in the summer, but looks like it will be sooner.

Yesterday Steve and I went into San Francisco for this year's Crossroads Irish-American Festival kickoff event: "Telling the Untold: Uncovering and Healing in Irish-American Writing." The three writers—novelist Emer Martin, poet and collagist Linda Norton, and essayist Eanlai Cronin—were amazing and I came away brimming with ideas. I've been thinking of Famine as the central trauma in Irish history of the past two centuries, but they were talking about the fatal grip of the Church, colonialism and the loss of the Irish language and "learned docility," sexual shaming of girls pregnant out of wedlock, the horrifying Magdalene laundries, and abusive boarding schools purporting to educate poor children in industrial trades. I bought Emer Martin's novel The Cruelty Men (and discovered when I got home that my son Ben already had it). I talked a little to Linda Norton after their readings and panel discussion. I wish I'd bought her book, but I read her long essay  online later: "The Great Depression and Me: Notes of an American Thinker-Tinker." Her brother was bipolar (and an aunt, I think?) and I identified myself as bipolar. Didn't say I was a writer, or a professor (she teaches at SFSU). (Shades of what interactions at AWP are like for me. Even without the coronavirus, I'm just as glad I'm not going this year.) She gave me her card, but she's pretty eminent and I'm not sure I have the nerve to suggest meeting. She does really cool collages as well as hybrid memoir/poetry texts.

moderator, Eanlai, Emer, Linda

Exciting mail: Claudia McGill sent me her art for "Why Indeed" and her art for my flash last year as well.  Love it.

Still no sign of my contributor copies of the new PASSAGES NORTH.