blurbs, and synchronicity

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.