Waiting on blurbs in the next week or two, which I’ll reveal later, since my pub date isn’t until March 23, 2027 and I'm afraid publicity this far in advance will fall by the wayside. 

But I’m beyond excited to receive my first blurb today, from Jayne Anne Phillips (!), whom I almost didn’t approach at all because she's such a big name and seemed such a long shot.  Not someone I know, even from the online literary community, not a former teacher (without an MFA, I hardly have any, and only for flash).

But I wrote to her because BLACK TICKETS was an influence on my flash fiction chapbook THE MISSING GIRL. Because her latest novel NIGHT WATCH, which won a Pulitzer Prize, features  a nineteenth-century mental asylum. And because she has a new memoir (really a memoir-in-essays) that I like a lot.

I also asked two writers whose essays are in the top echelon of my essay pantheon. 

I just heard from the essayist Jill Talbot, whose blurb will be here soon. She was almost finished with the book, and hadn’t yet read my essay “Connections,” about synchronicity and coincidences and interconnections. She shared an amazing anecdote:

Here's a story for you: I read a good portion of your manuscript this morning at Kwik Kar (state inspection and oil change), and I was in the middle of "A Normal Life" (Janet Frame) when my car was ready, so I left to come home and finish the manuscript. I say all this to make clear that I had not read "Connections" at this point of interruption. In the waiting area, not long before a young, pink-haired woman sat down across from me, a woman with shoulder-length white hair sat down next to me and pulled out her knitting. The pink-haired woman got up to go outside to take a call, but as it's almost 100 here just before noon, she comes back inside to continue the conversation and pulls out a blanket that she folds across her lap (her knitting). It's clear after a few of her comments that she's on the phone with a friend who's "in a mental facility," offering counsel regarding a therapist who "sounds judgmental," and shares her own qualms about her therapist, who doesn't understand "those of us who live with mental illness . . . " (I didn't hear the rest).  So I had my own experience with synchronicity at Kwik Kar this morning. Amazing.

I'll wait until preorders are available (in early October, I think) to do a cover reveal on Substack and social media, but I can't resist posting the cover for THE LUNATICS' BALL here. 

cover art: James Diaz, "Ophelia Mutation"
cover design:  Melissa Dias-Mandoly

Juliet Williams, the Production Manager at Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press was great to work with, and I was so pleased that the team at the Press agreed to use the art I wanted.

I know James Diaz as the editor of the online zine ANTI-HEROIN CHIC, where I've published. He does wonderful surrealist collages, which you can find here. This one was published in KHORA, the "dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with groundbreaking author Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing" (recently dissolved). The weekend workshop I took with Lidia several years ago produced a flash and part of a short essay included in THE LUNATICS' BALL.

​I looked up Melissa Dias-Mandoly and she has a website with some interesting collages herself.  The Design and Production Manager at the University of Pittsburgh Press, she also does freelance cover designs that have been featured in ELECTRIC LIT and LIT HUB.

From macro to micro news: I have a six-sentence micro out in GOOSEBERRY PIE today. "Why Not?" might be the shortest microflash I've written.

Working hard on the interview I volunteered to do with Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, editors of the forthcoming Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay. I finished the book, which I really like, but it's not so easy to formulate questions for the editors, since I can't really engage with the essays they included, just their introduction.

​I say yes too easily. At least I turned down an invitation to co-edit an anthology of flash creative nonfiction, also for teaching, which is a great idea and I imagine would have turned out to be tons of work.