NUNUM did a short interview with me that's now online. Not sure whether I'd answer the questions the same way now, but it's pretty recent!

I'll be reading "My Mother's Suitcases" from THE LUNATICS' BALL at a Rolling Writers garden reading in late June. I just read "Shooting Mussolini" at Patricia's Books on B reading, also from the book. I need to decide what to read at the Irish-American Crossroads Salon on March 29. It needs to be Irish-related, and Violet Gibson (who attempted to assassinate Mussolini) was Irish. I have a fictionalized monologue from Lizzie Halliday (as well as a long essay) in the book, but I don't know whether they want to hear about an Irish-American serial killer! Also more flash fictions than I remember publishing that grew out of the research for THE LUNATICS' BALL, back when I thought it might include straight fiction. I read the one about Crazy Jane once and really enjoyed it. The Crossroads folks say they're allotting 10-15 minutes per reader, which is a lot.

Still no edited manuscript and I think I just have to accept that the manuscript won't be complete by April 1, even if I manage to have all the other materials ready . Disappointing, but not the end of the world to be published in fall 2027 instead of spring 2027.

I will use one of Jon Crispin's stunning photos from his installation THE WILLARD SUITCASES project in THE LUNATICS' BALL, and this morning we had a long and unexpected phone conversation about his installation and other artists who've been inspired by it (in music and dance). Feeling overwhelmed by all I have to do for the book, but the book also brings gifts like that.

My flash "Monkey Business" was just published in the "Amuse Bouche" series in LUNCH TICKET. It was written just after the election, before the inauguration. The apocalyptic ending would have been much darker if I'd known what would follow. Who could have imagined where we are now?

Over a period of many years, I've published three times in LUNCH TICKET, a magazine I like a lot:  first longform creative nonfiction, then longform fiction, now flash fiction.

​There was no photo with the flash, but this one caught my eye on unsplash.

I hadn't really thought of them as related. But selling copies of my flash collection THE MISSING GIRL at Patricia's reading yesterday has me reflecting on that. I see I was already thinking about connections in an interview with Jayne Martin five years ago, when THE LUNATICS' BALL was in its infancy. Today I posted the interview and some thoughts in a Substack. It will be a year before THE LUNATICS' BALL comes out (that is, if I can meet the April 1 deadline for the edited ms., which I have yet to see but should have very soon, really have to have very soon), so I should resist the temptation to write Substacks! I want to do one on April 7 since that turns out to be the centenary of Violet Gibson's attempt to assassinate Mussolini, the subject of the flash I read yesterday. 

Fu.n reading today at Books on B to launch Patricia. Bidar's PARDON ME FOR MOONWALKING. Left to right: Patricia, Dawn Tasaka Steffler, me, Lynn Mundell. Everyone's readings were great!

I just realized recently that I've appeared in the UK journal FICTIVE DREAM more often than in any other journal. They had a sort of celebration every year, "Flash Fiction February," with a new flash every day for a month and I was included more than five years running (six? maybe seven?). They've recently started Micro Mondays and ended Flash February. A creature of habit, I wanted something in February anyway! Here's "Fish Oil."

I've never met her in person, but I really like Laura Black, the editor, and enjoy our correspondence.

Kristen, the EIC at Mad Creek, has promised that she'll send the edited manuscript of THE LUNATICS' BALL by early next week and suddenly I'm overwhelmed by all there is to do, the marketing materials, permissions, a form on the cover I didn't even see until today. I've accomplished a lot already, particularly on the illustrations. But it feels like a lot. She's leaving for AWP and I remember I stopped at the Mad Creek Books booth and talked to her at last year's AWP, and sent her the manuscript shortly after. So it's been less than a year from submission to being awarded runner-up for the Gournay Prize to receiving a publication offer to almost having the manuscript ready and edited. Seems amazingly fast.

I'm planning to use my Substack just for THE LUNATICS' BALL: brief posts on individual lunatics, color photographs I can't include in the book, issues related to the book (fact and fictionality, speculative nonfiction, for example), maybe some short interviews with other writers and artists whose projects are related. I'm looking forward to it! And probably starting way too soon, as it will be at least a year, probably a year and a half before THE LUNATICS' BALL comes out. My most recent Substack post addresses why I wrote the book and provides a list of "lunatics" invited to the ball.

​Waiting with some trepidation for the edited version of my manuscript (my editor-self excited to see what the experienced editor will do to make it shorter, my writer-self worried about her darlings). Four of my writing group members have published books in the past few years, so I knew to expect this to be late. I keep checking my email anyway. In the meantime I’m busying myself with other, surprisingly time-consuming tasks: chipping away at a bear of a marketing questionnaire, checking all previous pubs for how the magazines want reprints to be credited (a distressing number of really good magazines have gone under), and working on the illustrations, which won’t be color (again my writing group consoled me here; one writer with a six-figure advance from Houghton Mifflin couldn’t persuade them to do any color illustrations). I’d never heard of .tifs before, or thought about pixels, and the task looked gargantuan but I’ve happily discovered that some places, like the Metropolitan Museum in NYC and the Smithsonian in DC offer high resolution downloads for free. I just wrote to Jon Crispin, the photographer who did the photographs in the Willard Suitcases project, and will wait to hear what he charges for a photograph. I’d really like to include one. His stunning color photo installation memorializing the hundreds of abandoned suitcases and trunks discovered in the attic of the Willard State Lunatic Asylum were a real inspiration. I wanted to imagine their lives, try on their clothes. I published an essay in PASSAGES NORTH, “Madeline’s Trunk,” based partly on his 175 photographs of its contents. I’d include one of them here, but that’s the point, they’re copyrighted! I hope I can afford what the artist Ellen Gallagher might charge for her “Odalisque” depicting Freud and a Dora-like patient. If I can find her. Gallagher had a website when I wrote the essay; now she doesn’t. I fell into a rabbit hole today researching the 1928 Man Ray photograph of Matisse and one of his odalisque models that Gallagher riffs on in "Odalisque." That is, I think it’s Man Ray’s photograph, or is it by Brassai? Legitimate sources differ. I need to know that, if not for the caption (I’m not sure at all that I’ll include the predecessor photograph), for the essay about Gallagher’s “Odalisque” and its significance. At any rate, I’ve managed to assemble an astonishing number of high-resolution photographs for the book. Here’s just one that I’m disappointed won’t appear in color because I write about Mary Todd Lincoln and I was smitten by the dress as a child after I saw it at the Smithsonian on a family vacation. Not sure if this will be interesting enough in black and white.

​Planning to read an unpublished flash from the THE LUNATICS' BALL at Patricia Q. Bidar’s reading at Books on B on February 28. Hope I’m not a wreck afterward as I was after reading the title flash “The Lunatics’ Ball” at Sasha’s reading.

I've been in the UK magazine FICTIVE DREAM for their Flash Fiction February for over five years running. Laura Black has discontinued the series and substituted a weekly micro series. They also publish flash and longer fiction. I've been writing so little flash fiction, but I revived a number of flash when I was trying to find something for GHOST PARACHUTE, and I'm thrilled that Laura Black accepted "Fish Oil."

"Fish Oil" will appear on February 27. I'll be reading at Patricia Q. Bidar's book launch at Books on B (with Lynn Mundell and Dawn Tasaka Steffler, whose work I also love) on February. 28. Patricia made a great flier.

Steve finished a novella he's been working on for a long time, and the MS Word file disappeared from his desktop. He was distraught and after we tried everything, we took his laptop to the Geek Squad at Best Buy, which sent it to Louisville, Kentucky, hopefully to restore the file within 3-6 weeks. A day's adventure.
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By far the fastest that I finished a micro (at EIC Brett Pribble's request for a micro to replace "Ella's Going Places" in their upcoming anthology, since Ella would require five pages and their space is limited), sent it, had it accepted and then published in a new issue of the magazine. All within two days! 

Here's "I Can Tell You Now," with art from Brooksie C. Fontaine. It hadn't occurred to me until I saw her Cupid that this is an anti-Valentine's micro, but so it is. Lots of great writers in this issue, always the case with GHOST PARACHUTE.