My essay "Normal" was just accepted (a day after I sent it!) for the spring 2026 inaugural issue of Sarah Fawn Montgomery's online journal NERVE TO WRITE!

​I've been a big fan of Sarah Fawn's essays and nonfiction for a long time, beginning with her book QUITE MAD: AN AMERICAN PHARMA MEMOIR, an inspiration for THE LUNATICS' BALL. We published one of her nonfiction flash at CRAFT, and when she agreed to judge our Creative Nonfiction Contest, I interviewed her about her new essay collection HALFWAY FROM HOME.

When Sarah Fawn posted a call specifically for hybrid work a couple of days ago, I decided to look at my unpublished flash and essays in THE LUNATICS' BALL, even though I'd decided not to publish more from the project. And I found an essay that I'd set aside as too repetitious of other essays in the collection to include. It went through quite a few drafts several years ago. I took it through another few drafts (I'm up to draft 12) and then sent it off.

Here's Sarah Fawn's description of her new journal. I'm not sure that I feel excluded from ableist publications, but I love the idea of a community like this one. I wasn't going to insert the entire "About" page here, but I didn't know what to cut, as I like it all. A mission statement, really:

Nerve to Write is a space for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers to build the literary community we have long been denied. Often excluded from literary spaces who have the nerve to insist our stories do not matter or to require us to adhere to ableist standards in order to gain acceptance, we face the active erasure of our work. This erasure—which mimics the daily aggression of an ableist world—strikes a painful nerve that damages our stories and spirits.
 
Nerve to Write is a journal for those who have wondered how the ableist writing world has the nerve to deny our work access. This is a journal for writers who have wondered why editors have the nerve to say they have read too many stories about illness, to insist neurodivergent writers are making up or exaggerating the details of their lived experiences, to ask disabled writers to end on recovery. This is a journal for writers who wonder why most of the pieces about disability that appear in journals are written by abled family members or physicians.
 
This is a space dedicated to the rich expression and innovation of disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers. Here writers do not have to write for abled readers or translate their experiences for audiences who may not understand—or even believe—them. This is a space where disabled stories do not need to be cheerful or inspirational but can instead exhibit anger, sadness, sharp humor, and exquisite joy. Here writers do not need to shield readers from their suffering just as they do not need to perform their trauma. And this is a space that welcomes writing that directly addresses the disability experience but also writing that has nothing to do with disability at all, for this is not our only plot and purpose.
 
Sometimes the only thing more painful than disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent lives is trying to navigate ableist expectations, so we invite you to discover the nerve it takes to reject ableist literary spaces in favor of creating an inclusive space of our own. 

I'd forgotten the craft article by Cathy Ulrich that Grant Faulkner posted today in the Flash Fiction Institute newsletter.  It's apparently included in FFI's craft essay archives.

Here's what Cathy Ulrich said about my micro "Little Darling" in the "ABCs of Flash Writing: Q is for Quiet" in SPRY:
   
     Look at Jacqueline Doyle’s powerhouse story in Wigleaf, Little Darling.
     Her opening lines:  It was my idea. Not his.
    Those five little words. Only one of them has more than one syllable.     There is a story in those words, and in the quiet between them.
     The best flash writers are the ones playing the rests, letting the readers fill in those moments of silence with their own music, their own story.
     Master those quiet moments, those unsaid things. Your writing will be stronger for it.

That micro is probably mentioned more often than any of my others. (Grant devotes a couple of pages to it in his book THE ART OF BREVITY.) I remember workshopping the micro in my San Francisco writing group, where a new member with a book forthcoming from Sarabande really hated it. Somehow in those days I was able to insist on my vision and ignore criticism I didn't feel was merited. Now, not so much. Maybe because I'm not writing so well? At any rate I'm feeling discouraged.

Discouraged even though I got a soft reject today from a great journal that actually asked me to send something else now rather than in some unspecified future. (Especially nice because I'm struggling to write a similar soft reject at CRAFT and wasn't sure how to word it. We haven't done one like that before.)

Upcoming events: I'll participate in a group reading for the launch of  Sasha Vasilyuk's novel in paperback at the Sycamore in San Francisco on November 4. Should be fun. And I rescheduled my Flash Fiction Institute course for January 18, changed the format to a two-hour workshop. No idea whether I'll get enough students. This week's workshop at the Flash Fiction Institute (by a popular writer with a new book) was canceled for low enrollment. 

D.E. Harding will include reviews of chapbooks in her new magazine CLAUDINE and she did a great review of The Missing Girl in her first issue.

Here it is: The award-winning chapbook The Missing Girl by Jacqueline Doyle stuns with its sharp prose and astute understanding of human psychology.​
Weighing in far beyond its twenty-eight pages, this collection offers readers a feast—a veritable turducken of literature: a psychological thriller tucked inside a true-crime novel brilliantly folded into the form of eight flash fictions. In the titular story, the first in the collection, Doyle lures us with a first person narrator—a man, we soon realize—who ponders the flyer of a missing girl. Surely, we naively think, the narrator is as concerned as we are over the disappearance of tiny 14-year-old Eula Johnson of Modesto. “You feel like you know the girl,” the narrator says. We nod along, picturing a vulnerable child without her adults walking down a long, deserted road after school. Then, he says, “Just the kind to go missing.” Yes, we nod again—but. . . wait . . . no. Is there a “kind” of girl ripe for going missing? Hold on. What is the narrator asking us to agree to? Who is this guy? But it’s too late. Doyle has us now. We’ve been fly-trapped in the mind of a narrator who is not as harmless as he first seemed.​
In fact, assumptions will get you nowhere quick in this collection’s sticky, complicated, all-too-familiar world where alcohol flows too freely and slut-shaming abounds. Horrific crimes occur, but Doyle kindly spares us from violence on the page. This book isn’t about witnessing people at their lowest moments; it’s about how psyches soothe themselves, for better or worse, with self-narrative. It's about how seemingly innocent stories, even compliments, can become weapons.

We watch, gobsmacked, as Doyle twists and turns her characters through situation after problematic situation. They tell all sorts of tales about the events that surround them—either to avoid the pain of reality or the consequence of actions. Brains leap to lies and half-truths. Events are misremembered. One girl tries to believe she won’t end up sleeping with the douchey dude she’s leaving a bar with. Another isn’t quite sure if she tortured a childhood friend or not. Victims live in a disassociated haze. Aggressors concoct acrobatic explanations about how they’re the real victim. All the while, Doyle stands by our side, asking us why we’re so willing to trust a good story, why we’re so primed to believe—a haunting question that will keep us coming back to this collection, again and again.

Enrollment hasn't been good for any of the Flash Fiction Institute classes. Looks like my flash class will be condensed (from an asynchronous weekend workshop into a two -hour Zoom workshop). October is pretty full up, so I'm asking for a January date.

My interview with Grant Faulkner came out today in CRAFT.  This one was fun and didn't involve extensive preparation since I already knew his work. I've also been subbing in his Accountability group when he's away—twice this week—and enjoying that.

Flash acceptance! "Monkey Business" will come out in Lunch Ticket's "Amuse Bouche" online section in late January or early February. Really love the magazine, which I've been in twice before, long ago, with creative nonfiction and longform fiction.