Cool that both Jayne Anne Phillips (!) and Elizabeth Rosner retweeted my piece on Jayne Anne Phillips' BLACK TICKETS today (originally solicited by Tyrese Coleman to inaugurate SMOKELONG QUARTERLY's "Flash, Back" series on their blog). As an academic, I published many scholarly articles about contemporary women writers, never once attracting the notice of the writer herself!​ Elizabeth Rossner writes: "This is wonderfully great. Brings back vivid memories of my first time reading 'Black Tickets,' and reminds me of how influential those stories always were/are for me too." Hate the author picture I gave to SMOKELONG, which I never used again, but unfortunately I can't say it doesn't look like me. 

Another Sunday acceptance, this time of my micro-memoir sequence "Ugly Shoes," from BARREN MAGAZINE. This is the weird one that I started around the time I wrote "On Foot" (published in SLEAZEMAG, also a wandering essay about feet and bunions and shoes), and under the spell of the very flat voice in Beth Ann Fennelly's work and a novel by Elizabeth Strout. It's so unlike my normal creative nonfiction that I had no idea where to send it. In fact it's only had three rejections because I hardly sent it anywhere. I'm pleased that BARREN likes it.

BARREN is a new online zine. Their December issue will be their fourth. They're visually quite stunning, with beautiful photography, and their first three issues include a lot of writers whom I devotedly follow (Cathy Ulrich, A.E. Weisgerber, Paul Beckman. M. Stone, Anita Goveas, others). They mention in their acceptance letter that their overall acceptance rate for this issue was 4%. So I'm pleased to appear in their pages.