Got a wonderful blurb from the essayist Sonja Livingston.

Blurbs from three writers that I endlessly admire and that all have something to do with the book: Jayne Anne Phillips, Jill Talbot, Sonja Livingston. Two I didn't know personally. I'm very grateful

And I got some amazing news about my very short fiction collection (flash and short stories, just over 100 pages)  that I'm superstitious about posting until I have a contract in my hand. Very unexpected.

Copyedited manuscript of THE LUNATICS' BALL is due today and I'm finished, just looking it over again since this is the final deadline for any changes at all. Managed to do some quotation-checking and fact-checking as I went over the edits, which is a relief to me. A few tweaks there, nothing major, but one to a poem, and ideally there won't be a single error. I hear there are always errors, though.

I just received three wonderful blurbs from Jill Talbot: one short, one long, and third long one specifically for essayists. And an offer to do an interview later, which would be totally great.

Heard also that her ESSAY FORM(S) anthology/textbook won't be coming out with Columbia University Press, which is too bad, since it sounded like a great book. I hope she'll try to place it elsewhere.

What's the term for getting harassed online? More than harassed, really. When someone unleashes a torrent of vitriol. I blocked someone on Facebook who went after me for a post I did on the translators' takedown of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Two vicious long posts in my comments and then another in my private Facebook DMs. I was really shaken for a day or two. But now I can look back and laugh at my new epithet: he called me a "virago"! 

The OED has a great essay on the history and connotations of "virago.," which "is used in two core senses, both referring to women. One meaning is usually positive and refers to a female warrior or a woman who otherwise displays admirable, manly qualities; the other meaning is derogatory, referring to a woman who is overbearing, violent, or bad-tempered." I see that Merriam-Webster also has two definitions for "virago": "a loud overbearing woman" (really it was a pretty mild post, albeit critical) or "a woman of great stature, strength, and courage." I'll take it.

Waiting on blurbs in the next week or two, which I’ll reveal later, since my pub date isn’t until March 23, 2027 and I'm afraid publicity this far in advance will fall by the wayside. 

But I’m beyond excited to receive my first blurb today, from Jayne Anne Phillips (!), whom I almost didn’t approach at all because she's such a big name and seemed such a long shot.  Not someone I know, even from the online literary community, not a former teacher (without an MFA, I hardly have any, and only for flash).

But I wrote to her because BLACK TICKETS was an influence on my flash fiction chapbook THE MISSING GIRL. Because her latest novel NIGHT WATCH, which won a Pulitzer Prize, features  a nineteenth-century mental asylum. And because she has a new memoir (really a memoir-in-essays) that I like a lot.

I also asked two writers whose essays are in the top echelon of my essay pantheon. 

I just heard from the essayist Jill Talbot, whose blurb will be here soon. She was almost finished with the book, and hadn’t yet read my essay “Connections,” about synchronicity and coincidences and interconnections. She shared an amazing anecdote:

Here's a story for you: I read a good portion of your manuscript this morning at Kwik Kar (state inspection and oil change), and I was in the middle of "A Normal Life" (Janet Frame) when my car was ready, so I left to come home and finish the manuscript. I say all this to make clear that I had not read "Connections" at this point of interruption. In the waiting area, not long before a young, pink-haired woman sat down across from me, a woman with shoulder-length white hair sat down next to me and pulled out her knitting. The pink-haired woman got up to go outside to take a call, but as it's almost 100 here just before noon, she comes back inside to continue the conversation and pulls out a blanket that she folds across her lap (her knitting). It's clear after a few of her comments that she's on the phone with a friend who's "in a mental facility," offering counsel regarding a therapist who "sounds judgmental," and shares her own qualms about her therapist, who doesn't understand "those of us who live with mental illness . . . " (I didn't hear the rest).  So I had my own experience with synchronicity at Kwik Kar this morning. Amazing.

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.