my inspiring tweet (and an aside on asides)

I'm very proud of my work as Creative Nonfiction Editor at CRAFT.  In just under three years we've published absolutely stellar longform and flash nonfiction, garnering three Notable Essay citations in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS (something very few online journals have managed). We pay our writers (something else that very few online journals do) and have extremely limited space, publishing fewer essays and flash in a year than most journals do in a single issue. I hate rejecting so much great work, but feel good about the range and quality of what we've published, and how innovative our publications have been on the craft level. I don't post them here, as much as I love them, but today's was actually inspired by a tweet of mine. Definitely a first! Kathryn Silver-Hajo read Kathy Fish's newsletter on first-person plural and saw my response in the thread for the newsletter and was inspired to write something on the spot. She says in her author's note (another feature, along with the introductions, that I love at CRAFT): "Last fall, Kathy Fish penned a craft essay titled “We Real Cool” in her newsletter The Art of Flash Fiction. The essay, which addressed the use of first-person plural to create a sense of community and common purpose, was referenced in a tweet by Jacqueline Doyle expressing her desire to see more workplace-related creative nonfiction in the CRAFT submissions queue. That convergence lit a fire in me and the story of my time at the magazine poured forth." Often there is spirited discussion on the editorial team before we accept a piece, but we were all immediately taken by Kathryn's flash "We Had Something Beautiful."

Coincidences abound. I'm trying to write a wandering essay about synchronicity for my WIP (maybe? I've abandoned a number of completed essays that didn't seem quite right when I'd finished them). And today I see that BREVITY published an interesting craft essay about the phenomenon of parenthetical asides on the same day that my crazy hybrid "(Parenthetical Asides)" came out in CENTAUR. I like this from Jack Lancaster's "On the Aside Looking In": "In this way, understanding what the writer says between the parenthesis, and why they do, lets you feel like you’re on the inside of an inside joke. In nonfiction, these asides follow the shot of action with the chaser of the writer’s voice, an embodied clarity that the writer wants to tell you something directly."

Nicest reactions on twitter to "(Parenthetical Asides)" were from Genia Blum, whom I know, and Jay Parr, whom I don't know: "Holy crap I think I know what's opening my Short Reads class next time around." I looked him up and he's a lecturer in the nontraditional humanities program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. I'm always so excited when people teach my work (though of course it doesn't mean that the students will like it!).