My interview with Naomi Cohn about her innovative, genre-defying book from Rose Metal Press, THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA, was published in CRAFT today. Love this book for so many reasons, so it was great to talk to her via email.

As a writer engaged in a hybrid project that combines different voices and genres, I felt validated by her remarks on hybridity: “A piece of writing can be all these things—sometimes memoir, sometimes a collection of individual poems, a single coherent long poem, a lyric essay. It can move back and forth, shifting form.” 
 
And what she says about voice (Sonya Huber’s book also inspired me to stop worrying about the multiplicity of voices in THE LUNATICS’ BALL): “I really resonate with Sonya Huber’s assertion in Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto that we shouldn’t be limited to a single creative voice, that we need a multiplicity of voices to accurately reflect the complexity of our experiences.”
 
And this: “Why should any of us, as writers, limit ourselves to a smaller toolbox?”  

I just heard from a new reader who bought THE MISSING GIRL in preparation for assembling her own chapbook and found it powerful and meaningful for her own work. A response like hers is worth more than I can say. (Also, I just heard from Sarah Fawn Montgomery that she admires my flash cnf and learned a lot from it. Her researched hybrid memoir QUITE MAD is such an inspiration for THE LUNATICS' BALL!) I know that prospective publishers and agents want to see gigantic platforms, but it's the individual readers that mean so much to me.  THE MISSING GIRL was published in 2017. It's amazing that people are still reading it and that it still resonates. Glad that Black Lawrence Press has kept it easily accessible. Feeling moved and grateful.

Halfway through the #flashfictionfebruary event at FICTIVE DREAM, my flash "No Better Time Than Now" is out. This sendup of an overbearing, ineffective therapist is in fact based on stories from a writing group member, my husband, and something that happened to me, though the character is made up. 

So pleased that editor in chief Laura Black accepted work from me again (the seventh year running), and as ever I love the artwork from Claudia McGill.

After years of work, THE LUNATICS' BALL is ready for the outside world. Sent it out today to one of my first choice publishers. It feels different hitting "submit" on Submittable for a 92,000-word manuscript than it does for a longform essay or story or flash.  A leap into the unknown.

My flash "The Chair" is out in South Florida Poetry Journal (known as SOFLOPOJO). (Scroll down. The flash are in alphabetical order, and there are lots of friends and stars in this lineup.) A big thank you to Francine Witte (resident of Manhattan, not Florida). I was startled to see that a late-marriage breakup and the husband's chair figured prominently in another flash I wrote. There's nothing autobiographical about the flash, or the wing chair. BUT my father's wing chair figured in an essay I wrote (and rewrote, and rewrote) for DO IT YOURSELF NIGHT, the essay collection I'll turn back to when I get THE LUNATICS' BALL launched.

The voice and the runons and the defiance of grammar was fun in "Teachers' Pets," published in DOES IT HAVE POCKETS? A big thank you to Camille Griep, who gave me a chef's kiss for the ending.

My first time in both magazines. Love both of them.

Advice from two K-12 teachers that I've somehow never forgotten. A high school teacher, Mr. H, told me I'd be an excellent student when I learned how to apply myself to tasks I didn't want to do. As I procrastinate about building my 6-week flash class and learning the online platform, I realize that I never did learn that. I put Mrs. W.'s advice (sixth grade, I think) into the "Teachers' Pets" flash. I needed to learn how to take a compliment, she said. As the two flash rack up praise on Facebook, I immediately discount it. Steve says I always do that. Another lesson I haven't learned.

DOES IT HAVE POCKETS? did a nice graphic for the flash:

​A spacious airbnb this weekend in a woodsy area 15-20 minutes from Auburn. Unfortunately it's been raining buckets and the hot tub is outside so I haven't even tried it. Getting lots of work done, though.

I don't have many forthcoming pubs, and of course two of them are coming out on the exact same day. DOES IT HAVE POCKETS? will publish my microflash sequence "Teachers' Pets" on Saturday, and SOFLOPOJO (that's SOUTH FLORIDA POETRY JOURNAL) will publish my one-paragraph flash "The Chair" on Saturday as well. And I'll be away. Steve's going to a retreat in Auburn, and we'll both stay at an airbnb in the woods nearby. With a hot tub. I'm bringing work (but, hey, there's a hot tub).

This is one I'd honestly forgotten. Grateful to Will Woolfitt for letting me know that he's teaching "My Saints" from DUENDE in his fiction-writing class at Lee University this semester. He's also taught various nonfiction flash of mine in the past. I'm a big admirer of his poetry, stories, and essays, which makes it even more of an honor.

I love "Flash Fiction February," when FICTIVE DREAM publishes a new flash every day. FICTIVE DREAM editor Laura Black has been curating the event for eight years, I think, and this is the seventh year when I've been lucky enough to participate. It's like a grand party. I also love the art by Claudia McGill. I have several of her illustrations that I want to frame, but can't decide on which ones. In fact I couldn't decide on what art to include here, so I'll include six!

THE LAB: EXPERIMENTS IN WRITING ACROSS GENRE, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2025 (preorder here), includes my flash "The Lunatics' Ball" and a craft essay where I talk about my hybrid writing. In June, Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante will teach a week-long workshop on Mallorca based on the book! I'm excited to know that students will have access to my work. And that my first readers will be in such a beautiful place.

Finally finished the short preface to THE LUNATICS' BALL so it's ready for my two beta readers. Figured out that my first deadline for submission is February 15. Also extremely discouraged as I went through the possible publishers and had to eliminate most of them because at 92,000 words LB is too long. Should I try to get an agent? Will this process take years? Will I ever find a publisher?

I just discovered that THE PAST TEN, ed. Donald Quist, Kali White VanBaale, and Bailey Gaylin Moore (Cornerstone Press), which will include my essay "January 10, 2014," is available for pre-order here. They also have some nice blurbs for the book:

"A reflective mosaic, made up of some of the most exciting voices in American literature today." —Jaquíra Diaz

"The 71 essays in The Past Ten may be 'fun-sized' (1,000 wors max) but boy, do they pack a wallop. Heartbreaking and heartrending, even the most harrowing of them full of hope." —David Jauss

"The many memoirists assembled here create compelling codas, artificial endings, closing parentheses in order to look back and look closely, sit and sort, assess and assay with gifted elan and elegant exegesis, and see for the very first time these very mean and memorable meanings." —Michael Martone

"What a powerful and brimming treasure trove of stories this is: stories of transformation of metamorphosis, of loss, of love, and of becoming, A persuasive and ingenious ode to time: its waves and meanders, its sharp cures and gentle arms." —Robin Marie MacArthur

I guess it's not the only essay I wrote last year, as I wrote some new ones for THE LUNATICS' BALL and revised many, but it may be the only essay I published. I thought of PAST TEN as a literary journal, but actually it's not. The content is solicited (until now, anyway) and it's a blog (laid out a bit more like a journal, not a continuous column like most blogs). Glad it's turned into a book. I'm excited about participating in the offsite reading at AWP at the end of March. We made our reservations at the. Marriott, the fancy hotel at the center of things. Haven't decided whether we'll fly or drive. Flying Southwest to Los Angeles just before Christmas was unexpectedly pleasant.