NUNUM just wrote to me that they're nominating "Your Perfect Day" for BEST MICROFICTION! I'm not sure whether that's for this year or next year. It's not out yet, but it will be included in their Winter 2025 issue, so maybe it's coming out sooner than I thought. Right now I'm struggling with their difficult interview questions (at least difficult to me). They want contributors to make up some of their own interview questions as well, which should make the interview easier, but I don't have any great ideas today.  NUNUM is a very cool, small, Canadian, online zine that pairs graphics and art with text. 

I'm bursting with news I can't disclose yet because it hasn't been announced. So I'll wait for that.

This morning I woke up thinking about tonight's reading in the Mission and wondering how hard it's going to be to park. I'm looking forward to reading the title flash from THE LUNATICS' BALL. I got up and opened my email to a rejection of a piece that was accepted in the next email.

CLEAVER accepted my nonfiction micro "Faceplant"! It's about the pretty catastrophic fall I suffered a few years ago (when I had to give my talk for SUPERSTITION REVIEW with the camera off because I still had two black eyes). It's the only time I ever had involuntary flashbacks about an accident and I really wanted to describe that. 

I know Kathryn Kulpa, the flash editor at CLEAVER, so I wasn't sure it was okay to send it there. When I queried in advance, she said that she'd assign it to two other readers. She named the other readers in her acceptance. I really like CLEAVER and published two of my favorite nonfiction flash there a long time ago.

And my strange hybrid medley "Some Come Back" came out in BENDING GENRES today. I never showed this one to my writing group, since it seemed too odd, too much a product of my obsession with Poe (dating back at least to my PhD, when I wrote a 600-page dissertation on Poe and the American modernists, but probably back to childhood). I published an article on "Berenice," the least well-known of Poe's women, in Poe Studies.  I conclude my Bending Genres hybrid with her: "l admit it. I was obsessed with Berenice’s teeth. Obsessed. I abstracted them. Okay, I extracted them. I inadvertently buried her alive, but the toothless hag clawed her way out of her grave. Who knew she’d be back?"

(1919 illustration of "Berenice" by Harry Clarke)

I love Claire Polders' Substack "Wander, Wonder, Write," really a series of essays (not just blog entries or travel pieces) written during her nomadic travels. She's a prolific writer (memoir, novels, essays, flash) and also a prolific reader who recently recommended her favorite fiction from this year's reading, and today her favorite nonfiction.  THE LUNATICS' BALL heads her list of twelve books (eleven of them published) in "2025 Best Books Part Two: Nonfiction and Hybrids"!

The Lunatics’ Ball by Jacqueline Doyle
"Let’s begin with a book that’s… not yet published. If you’re lucky enough to have talented author friends who trust you with their work in progress, you may get to read amazing books long before they’re available to the public. This was the case for me when I was given Doyle’s masterful book The Lunatics’ Ball. It’s a riveting memoir on her bipolar disorder—the discovery, the struggle, the acceptance—and a lyrical, sometimes speculative exploration of how women throughout history have dealt with their mental illness and how men and the medical establishment have mistreated them horribly. The book is also much more than that. I have every reason to believe that The Lunatics’ Ball will be published in 2026 or 2027, and when it does, you’ll hear about it from me again!"

My San Francisco writing group read most of the flash and essays in THE LUNATICS' BALL,, some more than once as I revised them, but my husband Steve and Claire are the only writers who read the book from beginning to end after I completed the manuscript. Claire's critiques were so helpful! (Steve's too, always.) I am so grateful to her. And I'm grateful that she included me in today's Substack.

I also read her memoir about an eldercare crisis with her father-in-law during the pandemic, which is beautifully written and I'm sure will find a publisher. Her flash collection WOMAN OF THE HOUR, recently published by Vine Leaves Press, is wonderful. (It's on sale at the moment, and would be a great holiday gift.)
​
I have a Substack that I started so that I could read other people's Substacks and have never used. (That is, I see a few posts there that I must have "re-stacked" by mistake as I was learning how to use it.) I just followed more people to get more followers as I'm about to make a big announcement that I've been sitting on since just before Thanksgiving. Bursting with the news, but I don't think I should say anything until it's been announced. I'm ecstatically happy.

Looking forward to reading at the launch for Sasha Vasilyuk's paperback on December 9 at the Sycamore in The Mission. 

I was just invited to participate in a nonfiction journal editors' panel in Hannah Grieco's essay-writing intensive class at The Writer's Center, 2:15-3:15 on Saturday, January 31.

And I'm sitting on news so amazing that I still can't believe it. I shouldn't share it yet, but soon. A great Thanksgiving gift.

Nice coffee today and lunch yesterday with a fellow writer, Patricia Q. Bidar, and my fellow CNF editor at CRAFT, Shara Kronmal, here from Chicago for her son's wedding. We correspond all the time, but I've never met Shara in person.

While I was reading two great micros that Patricia published today, I was interrupted by Olga Zilberbourg's post for the December 9 reading at the Sycamore, then Sasha Vasilyuk's request for a bio for the reading. I'll post the flier below.

And then I was interrupted by an acceptance from BENDING GENRES for "Some Come Back," a strange medley/riff on Poe stories that I just sent them yesterday. I had no idea at all where to send such a strange composition, or what genre to call it. Hybrid, certainly. It will appear in their next issue, in December.

Great state election results nationwide (finally something to celebrate). I rushed through an acceptance at CRAFT of a CNF flash I'm in love with. Really really in love with. And I got an acceptance of a flash fiction from NUNUM today ("we love it, you popped our heads"), a fun Canadian zine where I published "Super Stanley" (also a monologue from a somewhat unreliable narrator). They were nice enough to nominate "Super Stanley" for a Pushcart and Best Microfiction. Here's the cover from that issue. Looking forward to the art in Spring 2026. Combining art and flash is their thing.

​More good news! CRAFT has two Notable Essay listings in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2025! Elissa Lash, "Twelve" and Starr Davis, "Pawn." So exciting for an online journal that just started publishing CNF five years ago. We've now earned seven Notable Essay listings.

My great CRAFT editorial assistant Amy Cook let me know that ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES posted my essay on Judith Ortiz Cofer from ages ago on their Instagram account today. (Amy has also published in ASSAY, an amazing online journal combining scholarship, pedagogy, and reflections on nonfiction. I wish it had been around when I was first teaching.)  A couple of hours later it occurred to me to look at their other social media accounts, and they've posted it on Facebook  and BlueSky too.

It's nice to see "Shuffling the Cards: I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer" get some new life. The series of eight academic notecards structuring the essay are not what I'd include today, but my narrative about my students and classes brought them back for me. It's interesting to relive that point in my life when scholarship/teaching/creative writing intersected, before I embarked on my new trajectory of writing/editing and left scholarship and teaching behind. I miss the students at Cal State East Bay. 

Here's what ASSAY says on Facebook: "This Pedagogy Monday, we’re highlighting Jacqueline Doyle’s essay “Shuffling the Cards: I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer” from Assay issue 4.1. In this piece, Doyle invites educators to re-deal the deck of narrative inheritance, examining how Cofer’s storytelling threads oral traditions, cultural memory, and generational change into classrooms. By using cards, metaphors, and shifting perspectives, she challenges us to help students shuffle through whose voice leads, how stories get passed on, and what it means to write from the middle of history."

​I love the illustration they chose:

My essay "Normal" was just accepted (a day after I sent it!) for the spring 2026 inaugural issue of Sarah Fawn Montgomery's online journal NERVE TO WRITE!

​I've been a big fan of Sarah Fawn's essays and nonfiction for a long time, beginning with her book QUITE MAD: AN AMERICAN PHARMA MEMOIR, an inspiration for THE LUNATICS' BALL. We published one of her nonfiction flash at CRAFT, and when she agreed to judge our Creative Nonfiction Contest, I interviewed her about her new essay collection HALFWAY FROM HOME.

When Sarah Fawn posted a call specifically for hybrid work a couple of days ago, I decided to look at my unpublished flash and essays in THE LUNATICS' BALL, even though I'd decided not to publish more from the project. And I found an essay that I'd set aside as too repetitious of other essays in the collection to include. It went through quite a few drafts several years ago. I took it through another few drafts (I'm up to draft 12) and then sent it off.

Here's Sarah Fawn's description of her new journal. I'm not sure that I feel excluded from ableist publications, but I love the idea of a community like this one. I wasn't going to insert the entire "About" page here, but I didn't know what to cut, as I like it all. A mission statement, really:

Nerve to Write is a space for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers to build the literary community we have long been denied. Often excluded from literary spaces who have the nerve to insist our stories do not matter or to require us to adhere to ableist standards in order to gain acceptance, we face the active erasure of our work. This erasure—which mimics the daily aggression of an ableist world—strikes a painful nerve that damages our stories and spirits.
 
Nerve to Write is a journal for those who have wondered how the ableist writing world has the nerve to deny our work access. This is a journal for writers who have wondered why editors have the nerve to say they have read too many stories about illness, to insist neurodivergent writers are making up or exaggerating the details of their lived experiences, to ask disabled writers to end on recovery. This is a journal for writers who wonder why most of the pieces about disability that appear in journals are written by abled family members or physicians.
 
This is a space dedicated to the rich expression and innovation of disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers. Here writers do not have to write for abled readers or translate their experiences for audiences who may not understand—or even believe—them. This is a space where disabled stories do not need to be cheerful or inspirational but can instead exhibit anger, sadness, sharp humor, and exquisite joy. Here writers do not need to shield readers from their suffering just as they do not need to perform their trauma. And this is a space that welcomes writing that directly addresses the disability experience but also writing that has nothing to do with disability at all, for this is not our only plot and purpose.
 
Sometimes the only thing more painful than disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent lives is trying to navigate ableist expectations, so we invite you to discover the nerve it takes to reject ableist literary spaces in favor of creating an inclusive space of our own. 

I'd forgotten the craft article by Cathy Ulrich that Grant Faulkner posted today in the Flash Fiction Institute newsletter.  It's apparently included in FFI's craft essay archives.

Here's what Cathy Ulrich said about my micro "Little Darling" in the "ABCs of Flash Writing: Q is for Quiet" in SPRY:
   
     Look at Jacqueline Doyle’s powerhouse story in Wigleaf, Little Darling.
     Her opening lines:  It was my idea. Not his.
    Those five little words. Only one of them has more than one syllable.     There is a story in those words, and in the quiet between them.
     The best flash writers are the ones playing the rests, letting the readers fill in those moments of silence with their own music, their own story.
     Master those quiet moments, those unsaid things. Your writing will be stronger for it.

That micro is probably mentioned more often than any of my others. (Grant devotes a couple of pages to it in his book THE ART OF BREVITY.) I remember workshopping the micro in my San Francisco writing group, where a new member with a book forthcoming from Sarabande really hated it. Somehow in those days I was able to insist on my vision and ignore criticism I didn't feel was merited. Now, not so much. Maybe because I'm not writing so well? At any rate I'm feeling discouraged.

Discouraged even though I got a soft reject today from a great journal that actually asked me to send something else now rather than in some unspecified future. (Especially nice because I'm struggling to write a similar soft reject at CRAFT and wasn't sure how to word it. We haven't done one like that before.)

Upcoming events: I'll participate in a group reading for the launch of  Sasha Vasilyuk's novel in paperback at the Sycamore in San Francisco on November 4. Should be fun. And I rescheduled my Flash Fiction Institute course for January 18, changed the format to a two-hour workshop. No idea whether I'll get enough students. This week's workshop at the Flash Fiction Institute (by a popular writer with a new book) was canceled for low enrollment. 

D.E. Harding will include reviews of chapbooks in her new magazine CLAUDINE and she did a great review of The Missing Girl in her first issue.

Here it is: The award-winning chapbook The Missing Girl by Jacqueline Doyle stuns with its sharp prose and astute understanding of human psychology.​
Weighing in far beyond its twenty-eight pages, this collection offers readers a feast—a veritable turducken of literature: a psychological thriller tucked inside a true-crime novel brilliantly folded into the form of eight flash fictions. In the titular story, the first in the collection, Doyle lures us with a first person narrator—a man, we soon realize—who ponders the flyer of a missing girl. Surely, we naively think, the narrator is as concerned as we are over the disappearance of tiny 14-year-old Eula Johnson of Modesto. “You feel like you know the girl,” the narrator says. We nod along, picturing a vulnerable child without her adults walking down a long, deserted road after school. Then, he says, “Just the kind to go missing.” Yes, we nod again—but. . . wait . . . no. Is there a “kind” of girl ripe for going missing? Hold on. What is the narrator asking us to agree to? Who is this guy? But it’s too late. Doyle has us now. We’ve been fly-trapped in the mind of a narrator who is not as harmless as he first seemed.​
In fact, assumptions will get you nowhere quick in this collection’s sticky, complicated, all-too-familiar world where alcohol flows too freely and slut-shaming abounds. Horrific crimes occur, but Doyle kindly spares us from violence on the page. This book isn’t about witnessing people at their lowest moments; it’s about how psyches soothe themselves, for better or worse, with self-narrative. It's about how seemingly innocent stories, even compliments, can become weapons.

We watch, gobsmacked, as Doyle twists and turns her characters through situation after problematic situation. They tell all sorts of tales about the events that surround them—either to avoid the pain of reality or the consequence of actions. Brains leap to lies and half-truths. Events are misremembered. One girl tries to believe she won’t end up sleeping with the douchey dude she’s leaving a bar with. Another isn’t quite sure if she tortured a childhood friend or not. Victims live in a disassociated haze. Aggressors concoct acrobatic explanations about how they’re the real victim. All the while, Doyle stands by our side, asking us why we’re so willing to trust a good story, why we’re so primed to believe—a haunting question that will keep us coming back to this collection, again and again.