mini-essay on my influences, upcoming anthology

The Lit Chat on Friday night in Santa Cruz was wonderful. Despite the rain, a large, warm audience showed up (full of interesting questions), It was great seeing Catherine Segurson and Lisa McKenzie of Catamaran Literary Reader. 

Lots of introspection lately about my attraction to dark subjects (I reread Caite Dolan-Leach's fascinating essay about missing girls and also some essays by Alice Bolin on noir before the Lit Chat. Bolin's essay collection Dead Girls is coming out in June.) The Lit Chat has me thinking about literary influences too.

I just named some literary influences in an interview with The Ginger Collect about my story "Raney's Imaginary Friend." Today, a completely different list of my “Medusan muses” (Oates, Phillips, Cisneros, Morrison, Cixous) in a short piece I wrote for the cool website Many Gendered Mothers. Many Gendered Mothers is a “project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.” Love browsing through the other entries. I keep thinking, Yes! How could I not mention Maggie Nelson/Joan Didion/Virginia Woolf/Angela Carter/so many more?

Oddly related: I just heard this morning from an anthology I'd forgotten. Two years ago, they accepted my flash nonfiction essay "Mirrors and Reflections" (reflections about mirrors, aging, my body, teaching mirror scenes in literature, all in 1000 words). Now Feminine Rising, edited by Andrea Fekete and Lara Lillibridge, foreword by Anna March, has found a publisher (Cynren Press) and will be out in April 2019.