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.