reading tonight in sausalito, one of my flash taught in a creative writing class

Reading tonight with some other Black Lawrence Press authors at Studio 333 in Sausalito, a beautiful gallery where I read a year ago in the Why There Are Words series. A bit of a trek at rush hour for those who don't live nearby, but the series seems to have a strong local following and I'm really looking forward to it.

Excited to learn from a writer on Twitter that he taught my flash in POST ROAD "The Professor's Chair" when he was a T.A. in his MFA program. I ran across Samuel J. Adams because I loved his recent story in MONKEYBICYCLE and posted it. When he followed me back he said, "Thank you so much! At the end of my MFA, I had the great pleasure of sharing "The Professor's Chair" with creative writing undergrads and they loved it. I'm a fan!" And then elaborated, "I think the lesson was some version of 1) creating an intriguing voice 2) absurdist escalation 3) 'See! Not all cool stories are old! Not all good authors are dead!'"

Feeling gloomy about how dark my flash tends to be, but that one wasn't, and I did another in my writer's group last night that isn't either. So where to send this new one? (I never would have guessed that the super-prestigious print magazine POST ROAD would have been the place for "The Professor's Chair,"  so it's always hard to tell.) It seems most of the zines I follow like weird, dark, and experimental, not what I'm writing at the moment.

I've been feeling stalled—not at a standstill, still writing sporadically, but aimlessly. Picking up old pieces that need revision or completion, my attention scattered. But I just completed a long creative nonfiction essay that was an old, unfinished one with updates interspersed (learning from Ryan Van Meter's manipulation of time and the future in his essays in IF YOU KNEW THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW, which I just taught). And I'm jazzed about another project that I'm just starting to work on. Not sure what shape it will assume, but I'm involved in these flash about female "lunatics" of the nineteenth century, and the research I'm doing into early treatments of the mad.

Nervous about my cnf flash coming out in SWEET soon, which gave me permission to start excavating this subject and its personal significance.