​Cornerstone is fairly large for an indie press, publishing about sixty titles a year (all literary). This past year they’ve gotten a lot of awards. When they first accepted the book, I wrote to Steve’s good friend Rob Davidson, a professor of creative writing at Chico State. He’s published several books, most recently at Cornerstone, and praised them highly. There are a few really distinguished authors there right now with reviews in the New York Times. I know a number of their authors from online literary circles, including Cheryl Pappas, who has a novel coming out in 2028, and Brett Biebel, Heather Bourbeau, Abby Manzella, Donald Quist. I’m in Cornerstone's recent anthology THE PAST TEN, edited by Donald Quist and Bailey Gaylin Moore.

With the pub date so far off, I’m already wondering whether I should write some more stories, or maybe flash, for the collection.

Pinching myself. I've never considered myself a fiction writer. I write creative nonfiction. I write flash nonfiction. I write flash fiction. I write some fiction. In that order. I publish maybe one or two stories a year, and I had to reach very far back to assemble a group of stories that all relate to American literary texts. I like the way the collection coheres, and I'm surprised that I still like the stories I published when I first started writing.

cover art: James Diaz, "Ophelia Mutation"
cover design:  Melissa Dias-Mandoly

Juliet Williams, the Production Manager at Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press was great to work with, and I was so pleased that the team at the Press agreed to use the art I wanted.

I know James Diaz as the editor of the online zine ANTI-HEROIN CHIC, where I've published. He does wonderful surrealist collages, which you can find here. This one was published in KHORA, the "dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with groundbreaking author Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing" (recently dissolved). The weekend workshop I took with Lidia several years ago produced a flash and part of a short essay included in THE LUNATICS' BALL.

​I looked up Melissa Dias-Mandoly and she has a website with some interesting collages herself.  The Design and Production Manager at the University of Pittsburgh Press, she also does freelance cover designs that have been featured in ELECTRIC LIT and LIT HUB.

From macro to micro news: I have a six-sentence micro out in GOOSEBERRY PIE today. "Why Not?" might be the shortest microflash I've written.

Working hard on the interview I volunteered to do with Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, editors of the forthcoming Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay. I finished the book, which I really like, but it's not so easy to formulate questions for the editors, since I can't really engage with the essays they included, just their introduction.

​I say yes too easily. At least I turned down an invitation to co-edit an anthology of flash creative nonfiction, also for teaching, which is a great idea and I imagine would have turned out to be tons of work.

I've been testing out various readings from THE LUNATICS' BALL, wondering what I'll read once it comes out, and I found it surprisingly depressing to read "My Mother's Suitcases." I like the essay, but revisiting the period in my life when my mother was always angry at me,  and I had to deal with her dementia and medical care, left me feeling down.

I'm hoping to return to working on my essay collection DO-IT-YOURSELF NIGHT and that may be a problem there too.

The musician Lil Nas X came out as bipolar and I wrote a short Substack newsletter about that.

Mad Creek Books sent me the cover (which I'll wait to reveal when preorders are possible) and I'm wracked with doubt about choosing the right one of two possibilities. Both are really arresting, though, and I love how they've used the collage from James Diaz. Maybe I'll share the collage here later.

I'm thrilled by the three writers who've agreed to do blurbs: Jayne Anne Phillips, Jill Talbot, and Sonja Livingston. All relate to my subject (Phillips, a novelist who's written about lunatic asylums, a recent memoirist, Talbot and Livingston, both memoirists and essayists). Worried: should I solicit more than three in case they don't all come through by August 1? The Press will include 2-3 on the back cover, and it looks like most of their authors don't have more than that in their catalog, so I don't want to ask people whose blurbs won't appear anywhere but my author website. 

Working on my short story collection, because why not. Moon City Press said it "made it to the later stages of consideration," not one of twelve finalists but still encouraging when I'm not really a fiction writer.

Finally up to date on my CRAFT reading, CRAFT editing, and Black Lawrence Press reading (my once-a-year reading of 50 chapbook submissions). Steve and are finally going to get away to the coast for a couple of nights, a mini-vacation that we cancelled in May. And Ben will be visiting from Borneo next month!