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.)