I'll wait until preorders are available (in early October, I think) to do a cover reveal on Substack and social media, but I can't resist posting the cover for THE LUNATICS' BALL here. 

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.

A bucket list achievement for me! I've been longlisted several times for the WIGLEAF TOP 50 (VERY) SHORT FICTIONS, but I've never made the top 50. 

"Murderers Medley" in my two-part flash "Some Come Back" in BENDING GENRES just made the top 50!!!!

I'm so excited! As ever, I have many friends on the shortlist and longlist and I'm looking forward to rereading their flash and reading some new ones. I'm grateful to Robert Vaughan, the editor at BENDING GENRES who accepted my oddball piece, and Andrew Porter, this year's editor of the WIGLEAF TOP 50 and Sudha Balagapol, the series editor, and the staff who completed the colossal task of reading countless magazines to make their selections. 

Kathy Fish posted the list and her win and I went to browse, first to see whether CRAFT had any flash on the list (all fiction, of course, and yes we have 1 shortlisted and 4 longlisted) and then to look for friends and I wasn't even looking for my name when it popped up. Wow.

I've been a participant (audience or reader) at the Rolling Writers series for years now. When the pandemic hit, the series moved from the Rolling Out Cafe to Jon Sindell's beautiful garden backyard in San Francisco by invitation only (still a large audience). I read there last weekend, on  Father's Day, the first day of summer, an unexpectedly cold day.

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!

Two writers have agreed to do blurbs, so far—one a very supportive essayist whose class I've visited (virtually) and who teaches my work, the other the craziest of my long shots (who agreed because I'd published an appreciative essay about her work a long time ago). Both want hard copies, which I'll send tomorrow. Very exciting!

Sarah Fawn Montgomery's AWP proposal is in. I think it's a great proposal. We'll see if AWP thinks so too. Will the book be available for sale then? Official pub date is a week later.

Steve and I went to an inspiring theatrical performance by the People's Circus. Theater (acrobatics, music, words) at ODT in the Mission about the sculptor Camille Claudell. Extremely successful,  albeit controversial, she's best known now as Rodin's mistress. Her artistic career was halted in her late forties when her family had her incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. She spent thirty years there (despite the asylum's requests to her family to release her) and was still institutionalized when she died at the age of 78. Hence the title of the piece: "The Unfinished Work of Camille Claudel." Such a tragedy. Such a waste of artistic passion and talent. So like some of my "lunatics" in THE LUNATICS' BALL. (Lucia Joyce comes to mind, but Camille Claudel's talent had matured for many more years before it was cut short.)

Artist for the cover! Love the collage I was able to obtain by an emerging artist in the flash world. Should have the front cover in less than a month. Maybe I'll wait on the cover reveal?

​I was at a flash lunch yesterday with writers I like and someone asked me to describe the book and once again I failed utterly. It's a strange book. I think that's actually good.

I love Sarah Fawn Montgomery's idea for an AWP panel. Unfortunately one of the panelists hasn't responded with the information she needs for the proposal. I hope they do by tomorrow night, the deadline.

I got the long marketing questionnaire to Mad Creek Books last Sunday and they had their meeting about my book on Monday. It's official! They have a schedule for me. THE LUNATICS' BALL will be part of next year's spring season, with a projected pub date of May 23, 2027.

Suddenly there are more hurry-up tasks: the most pressing being the art for the cover, which they want by next week, though I couldn't contact the artist until they approved my recommendation in this week's meeting. I hope they come through. I've contacted them several ways, but haven't heard back yet. (Won't name them here for fear of jinxing the request.) And I need to start on blurbs already, several from people very difficult to contact.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is proposing a panel for AWP—Shaping the Silence: Women Writing Memoirs of Madness— with some great experimental memoirists. I'm really excited to be included, though I know AWP turns down a lot of proposals. I love all of the other prospective panelists, and Sarah Fawn has been a strong influence on my writing. I wrote about. her in a Substack when she published an essay of  mine in her new magazine  for neurodivergent and chronically ill writers NERVE TO WRITE.

An avalanche of hurry-up tasks at CRAFT, since the contest results came back for our annual Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, and we had to come up with two editors' choices immediately, and to edit five essays for publication in June (that means now and last week) and solicit and edit author's notes. Roxane Gay's choices were not what we expected, but they're excellent, and I'm doing collaborative edits on my very favorite right now.

I have a new Substack post on my recent creative nonfiction and on hybrid writing in THE LUNATICS' BALL by way of the essay I wrote about Geoff Dyer, which is partly about that. I never wrote a blog, or read blogs for that matter, but I can see the appeal that they had. You write something and then you post it. No looking for publication venues or worrying about whether what you've written is a coherent essay.

I should hold off on the interesting subjects: it will be almost a year before the book comes out, so it's really too early to start promotion.

I never have micros that are only 6 sentences long, but I fooled around with this one and sent it to GOOSEBERRY PIE a couple of days ago (not micro fiction so I just called it a micro,) and the editor Jeff Harvey accepted it today! It will be out in July.

Speaking of short, I have just about nothing under 300 words, and even though the FlashFlood Journal takes reprints, they've already published my micro fictions under 300 words in previous years. I sent them a few things this year (nonfiction) and they were rejected. So I won't be part of this year's party. Oh well.

Nice reading at Santa Clara University yesterday. First flash reading I've attended at a university, I think, organized by flash writer Claudia Monpere for SmokeLong Quarterly's EIC Christopher Allen's book tour in the US. Great dinner with lots of friends afterward. An elevator pic as we were leaving for dinner:

I finished the "final" edits of THE LUNATICS' BALL last Sunday and sent them in. That is, the manuscript went through a round of developmental edits from the Mad Creek EIC Kristen Elias Rowley. As agreed, she made suggestions for cutting the manuscript from 92,000 to 85,000 words (partly by cutting several essays, but also by trimming prose throughout, transforming two essays in particular that I now love). I had to really mull the edits over, and got the manuscript back to her for one last round where I answered her questions, mulled some more, inserted all 14 illustrations with notes for production and alt text descriptions for the visually impaired. (Permissions, especially for the illustrations, and finding high res photos turned out to be SO much work.) Sent the "final" manuscript, and all 14 images, and the permissions log and backup materials on the specified due date: April 19, last Sunday.

There will be more to do. A big marketing questionnaire. Copyedits. Approving a cover (I provided a lot of input and two possible illustrations, but the cover will be the Press's decision.)

But this is a major milestone and this week feels like vacation, despite quite a bit of work at CRAFT for our Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest.

EXACTLY one year ago, on April 24, 2025, I submitted THE LUNATICS' BALL to Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press! (I didn't realize it was an anniversary when I started this post. I'm amazed.) Now it will be a book by March 27, 2027. Which may sound like a long time, but I was already prepared for that by the illustrious members of my writing group who've published books in the past few years (with Big 5 publishers and indie publishers).  And prepared for anything, given their experiences, when it came to editing: I lucked out with an enormously talented editor.

The latest in CRAFT's  Chill Subs  listing (Duotrope for the cool kids): 

"Top-tier stuff. Not Paris Review, but close enough."