trees

I was ready to retire "What Grows on Trees" without looking for a place to publish it (feeling at a loss for a market for an expository flash). It has generated so much buzz, despite coming out in a magazine most writers don't read, that I'm thinking about personal essays as a genre, and my longer personal essays about my family. I put my project DO IT YOURSELF NIGHT aside for THE LUNATICS' BALL, which I thought wouldn't take very long. Could I revive that without losing momentum with my lunatics? It was so close, and a lot of those essays were Notables in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS.

Decided to move "What Grows on Trees" to my nonfiction page, instead of listing it on my flash page. Somehow hadn't thought about the distinction before. I think we publish both at CRAFT in the Creative Nonfiction flash category. I often reject short pieces that feel like "op-eds" to me. But there's also a difference between a personal essay and an op-ed.

Someone said something about trees this morning in her praise of my essay at CURRENT, which led me to seek out the wonderful anthology I was in at Outpost 19: ROOTED. I discovered that they're soliciting for a second volume which will include new work and also some of the original essays (fingers crossed that my essay "Saving Trees" is one of them, since I've always loved it).