​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 whatever he charges, and 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.
​

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.

Hannah Grieco invited me to visit her essay writing intensive class along with some other nonfiction editors (Vonetta Young, The Offing, Kate Gehan, Pithead Chapel, Matthew E. Henry, Porcupine Literary, Michael Todd Cohen, X-R-A-Y Lit). It was fun to hear what they had to say and the students' questions. I'm all for Zoom these days. Already thinking I won't do a traditional book tour for THE LUNATICS' BALL.

That said, I agreed to be one of the readers for Patricia Q. Bidar's launch of her short story collection PARDON ME FOR MOONWALKING at Books on B, Saturday, February 28, 2:30-4:00 pm. I haven't done a reading in Hayward since my reading on campus when THE MISSING GIRL came out. Looking forward to reading with Patricia, Lynn Mundell, and Dawn Tasaka Steffler. Love their work.

Looking forward to flash publications in LUNCH TICKET (any day now, I think), CLEAVER (not sure when), and now GHOST PARACHUTE (next month). My GHOST PARACHUTE microfiction will be included in the forthcoming anthology, which is fun, because a lot of people I know are included too. I will be for sale at AWP. Sorry I'm not going this year.

Waiting for edits on THE LUNATICS' BALL, due next week. I've started working on permissions and high resolution versions of my illustrations, which I was really worried about, but I managed to locate a TIFF version of the newspaper illustration of the lunatics' ball at Blackwell's Asylum (one that particularly concerned me), and the Metropolitan Museum offers a high resolution version of Toulouse Lautrec right on their site (and it's public domain), so I'm really pleased with my progress.

My first Substack post! I'm planning to post more about THE LUNATICS' BALL, which I won't duplicate here. I started with an illustration of the lunatics' ball at the Blackwell's Island lunatic asylum in 1865. (The subject of one of the early essays in the collection.)

AMAZING NEWS that I’ve known since Thanksgiving, but the acceptance had to clear a university press committee, the holidays intervened, and I wanted to wait until I had a signed contract. It’s official. I signed the contract yesterday.

(In the interim, the manuscript was also named one of twelve finalists for another really great book prize, winner to be announced in the spring. I just withdrew it, but I appreciated the added vote of confidence.)

My book THE LUNATICS’ BALL has been named first runner up for the Gournay Prize and will be published in 2027 by Mad Creek Books (the literary imprint of The Ohio State University Press) in their prestigious 21st Century Essays series. 
 
I am so grateful to the prize judges and series editors Kristen Elias Rowley, David Lazar, and Patrick Madden. I've already had a long Zoom call with Kristen, who will be editing the manuscript, and I love knowing the book will be in her capable hands. (Deadline for edits and permissions, April 1.) I'm grateful to all of the writers who supported the project, and in many cases, critiqued essays as I assembled the book, And to all the editors who accepted individual essays for publication.
 
Still catching my breath.
 
On the 21st Century Essay series:
"This series from Mad Creek Books is a vehicle to discover, publish, and promote some of the most daring, ingenious, and artistic nonfiction. This is the first and only major series that announces its focus on the essay—a genre whose plasticity, timelessness, popularity, and centrality to nonfiction writing make it especially important in the field of nonfiction literature. … The series is a major addition to the possibilities of contemporary literary nonfiction, focusing on that central, frequently chimerical, and invariably supple form: The Essay."
 
This is my dream publisher and series! They’ve published some of my favorite essayists. I already own many of their collections .
 
On my collection. 
My genre-bending essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball explores my two bipolar breakdowns and my bipolar aunt’s suicide within the expanded context of female lunatics in past centuries and the history of the treatment of mental illness in women.

I'll post more about the collection on my Substack, this week and in the coming months.

I love Will Woolfitt's essays, and I'm always gratified to hear that he's teaching mine in his classes at Lee University. He's taught a number of them over the years, and this semester he's teaching "Another Mary Doyle," inspired by Sonja Livingston's "A Thousand Mary Doyles," which he's also teaching. 

Here's the list he sent me, which makes me nostalgic for teaching: 
F 1.23 — Personal Identity & Names Readings: "Being Brians" – Brian Doyle; "Girl" – Jamaica Kincaid; "Where I’m From" – George Ella Lyon; "The Name of God" – Anya Silver M 1.26 — Family, Memory, & Collective Legacy Readings: Description handout, "’N’em" – Jericho Brown; "The House on Moscow Street" – Marilyn Nelson; "A Thousand Mary Doyles" – Sonja Livingston W 1.28 — Historical, Social, & Cultural Naming Readings: "Narrative: Ali" – Elizabeth Alexander; "Miscegenation" – Natasha Trethewey; "At the Cemetery, Walnut Grove Plantation, South Carolina, 1989" – Lucille Clifton; "Another Mary Doyle" – Jacqueline Doyle

​I looked up my essay (naturally) and I see that the family portrait is no longer included at the head of the essay., which is too bad. Interesting to see that I use the combination of speculation, fiction, and nonfiction that I also use in THE LUNATICS' BALL.

Did I report that THE LUNATICS' BALL is the first runner-up for The Gournay Prize at Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press? Really exciting news that I can share. Here's the winners' list.

Just got more good news yesterday that I can't share, and more good news last month that I still can't share yet.  

Here's what I posted on Facebook instead of my usual year-end link to a longer summary on my author website:

"Very grateful to Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press, where my manuscript THE LUNATICS’ BALL was named first runner up for the Gournay Prize. Grateful also to the following magazines for publishing my work this year: Hunger Mountain, NUNUM, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, FlashFlood Journal, Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets?, and SoFloPoJo. Grateful to Assay for reposting my essay there, to Claudine for a review of my chapbook THE MISSING GIRL, and to Flash Boulevard for publishing the micro included in the 2025 Wigleaf Top 50 longlist. Very grateful to W.W. Norton for including “The Lunatics’ Ball” in the textbook THE LAB: EXPERIMENTS IN WRITING ACROSS GENRE, and to Cornerstone Press for including my essay in the anthology THE PAST TEN. Participating in their reading was the highlight of my AWP, along with seeing so many writer friends, some for the first time in person. Thanks also to writers and editors who included me in readings in San Francisco and online. Thanks to all of you for your support and your own publications. You are a light in this year’s darkness. May you all prosper in your lives and creative endeavors in 2026."

If I'd had more space, I would have mentioned the interviews I did with Naomi Cohn and Grant Faulkner for CRAFT and also how gratifying it has been to work with authors and my great colleagues at CRAFT. How inspiring and supportive my writing group The Leporine Conspiracy has been.  My forthcoming work in LUNCH TICKET, CLEAVER, AND NERVE TO WRITE. 2025 was a very good year! Amazing really.

I can't seem to get the hyperlink feature on the website to work today, but I have some screenshots of my flash monologue "Your Perfect Day," just out in the innovative Canadian journal NUNUM, which combines art and text.  The artwork with mine is by Angel Dionne.