​I arrived at AWP in LA on Wednesday night with a few things in mind. I wanted to meet some friends and people whose work I know (some I’ve known for years on social media but never met in person). Meet some authors we’ve published at the online magazine where I’m an editor. Participate in a reading of a new anthology where my work just appeared. Attend a reading panel of working-class LA writers where my husband would be reading. Attend some offsite readings where friends would be reading.
 
I wanted to meet people, but I’m not a sociable person. I hurried by the babble of writers at tables in the lounge at the Marriott feeling overwhelmed by noise and the potential moment when someone would call my name. Indeed I was greeted by hugs on the street and at the book fair that initially felt like surprise attacks. Have I met this person before? Or are they just familiar from their picture online? What’s their name?
 
Now that I’m home again, I’m aware of the writers I wanted to meet and didn’t, the readings and panels I wanted to attend but couldn’t because of conflicts with other readings and panels. But I managed to get to a large breakfast of flash writers (even though it meant getting up at 7am). I managed to get to my own reading (which was excellent) and Steve’s (also great) and a few offsite readings (some with horrible acoustics). I managed to meet some writers I’ve known for a long while on social media. Some writers whose work I accepted and edited at the magazine where I work. A writer whose book I blurbed (much younger than me but also, it turns out, bipolar and in recovery). A writer whom I interviewed via email earlier this year (funny and smart with an unexpectedly deep voice). I had coffee with some writer friends here and there, some I know from the Bay Area but don’t often see. I chatted with some magazines where I’ve published before, and with the editor at the press that published my chapbook. I bought some books, but not more than I could carry home.
 
I managed to pitch my book a few times. I’ve sent it to one publisher so far, and have another in mind with an April deadline. I discovered that my chapbook publisher takes subs from previous authors year-round and I don’t need to wait for their open reading period. I have an elevator pitch, and a synopsis. Did I manage to use them? Of course not. 
 
On my last day at AWP, I walked to the Café Fig at Hotel Figueroa to meet two friends from my long-time bimonthly writing group for brunch. We used to meet in a member’s roomy flat in the Inner Richmond in San Francisco, and I’ve known one of them since those days. The other joined the group shortly after we switched to Zoom because of the pandemic. She lives in LA and I’ve never met her in person. On the way I noticed a pedestrian talking into his Bluetooth phone. Tall, lean, with bleached hair shaved close, a diamond stud in his ear. Good looking, dressed in fashionable, dark workout clothes. Maybe an aspiring dancer or actor. Let’s call him a dancer. Gradually I became aware that he was angry and confrontational in the phone call, saying he could sue someone. He arrived at the entrance to the Hotel Figueroa a little before me. A doorman in uniform stood between two ficus trees in planters, maybe eight feet tall. The pedestrian wrestled with one of the trees, and broke off a large branch near the base that connected to about half of the tree. He waved it once and then commenced walking with the enormous tree branch. The doorman’s expression didn’t change, he didn’t do a thing, probably the best course given the dancer’s erratic behavior.
 
My manuscript is called The Lunatics’ Ball, there are lunatics, there’s dancing, no one steals a tree. What’s my elevator pitch? Thank you for asking! “My genre-bending essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball explores my two bipolar breakdowns and my bipolar aunt’s suicide within the expanded context of female lunatics in past centuries and the history of the treatment of mental illness in women.” You can see that it would be hard to just say that, in an elevator or elsewhere. At least for me.
 
I missed a panel on speculative nonfiction I really wanted to attend, but made it to another and enjoyed the discussion of “what iffing” and how often that occurs in the wake of a death, particularly a suicide. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’ve described my creative nonfiction as speculative, my collection, which verges on the lyric and fictional, as genre-bending. And the synopsis? Here goes: “Inspired by my grief over the suicide of my young aunt, The Lunatics’ Ball grew into something larger than I’d expected, a collective (auto)biography combining research-based snapshots of over thirty female ‘lunatics’ with memoir essays tracing my aunt’s bipolar disorder and my own. In the nineteenth-century, lunatics’ balls in asylums gathered together lunatics, staff, and the public. Intended to show off the asylums’ enlightened treatment of their inmates, the balls often functioned as voyeuristic spectacles for a curious public, furthering the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ My lunatics’ ball introduces women from the past two centuries whose lives were touched by mental illness and who’ve been either misrepresented or excluded from history. Some are well-known, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Nina Simone. Others are lesser-known but equally compelling women, such as Lorina Bulwer, who embroidered her story in enormous samplers; Lizzie McNally Halliday, a serial killer called ‘the worst woman on earth’; and the writer Janet Frame, who narrowly escaped a lobotomy. Many of these women led tragic lives, trapped in asylums for decades or dying by suicide. Many of them spoke out or found other means of expression. Exploring their lives led me to scrutinize my own. I realized that I had let my bipolar diagnosis trap me and that it was time to emerge from my self-imposed silence to celebrate their courage and speak up myself. I needed to come out as bipolar and tell my story along with theirs.”
 
Some writers begin a project armed with a plan, others discover their plan while they’re writing and unfortunately that’s how mine evolved. Unfortunately because it’s a very large project which I wrote “bird by bird,” as Anne Lamott's father advised her brother when he was faced with a gargantuan school assignment. Organizing the pieces and fitting them together, identifying themes as they emerged, I felt like a lunatic wrestling with a ficus tree under the watchful eyes of a doorman. Or something like that.
 

The "flaunch" for SoFloPoJo was fun today. I added "A Bartender Named Destiny" to "The Chair," my first time reading "Chair" and I think the audience got the contrast between the italicized refrain-with-variations and the unfolding narrative without seeing it on the page. Second time reading "Bartender" (first was at Jon Sindell's) and it's fun to read. Francine will post a Youtube video and I'll post it here.

Also, I just ran across a review of The Missing Girl that I missed when it came out. Makes the writing seem pretty visceral, but maybe it is. I got so many reviews, especially considering it was a chapbook. I think it may have come out at just the right time, when #metoo stories and awareness of male violence was just coming into public consciousness .

Here it is:
Spencer Dew, “A Review of The Missing Girl by Jacqueline Doyle,” decomP, a literary magazine

He's got interesting comments about a number of the stories. This passage about the girl who wakes up to see "slut" written on her body interests me particularly:

Doyle, in this disturbing collection of stories of violence, of sex crimes, uses this image—the woman waking up from her violation to read a story about it on her own flesh—to remind her readers just how narratives work.

There is a power in contingency: the mystery of the speaker’s identity and reliability, in the razor-like divide between that which is said and the darkness of what is unwritten, which our struggling minds must necessarily imagine, reading as implied, rendering doubly horrific as that the details for which we provide from our own fears and for which the narrator, however callous about or even proud of his vicious acts, remains unwilling to elaborate. A story, according to one famous metaphor, should feel like that tiny crest of the iceberg, the bulk remaining below the waterline. Doyle is interested in the slosh, the suck, there where the frigid depths lap and pull at the slick steep incline. In Doyle’s stories, the readers scramble for a grip only to realize they are in the process of drowning, that they cannot possibly survive.

I'm going to read with the other flash writers in the past two issues of SOFLOPOJO on Friday afternoon via Zoom. Flying to AWP in Los Angeles next Wednesday for five days, where I'll read with some of the PAST TEN anthology contributors on Wednesday night. Looking forward to both. And to AWP, since I haven't been for a long time. My son has me a bit worried about masks and covid and flu, since anywhere from 12,000-15,000 writers attend AWP, but I just had a covid booster, at least. Looking forward to seeing people I know in person and people I know only online so far.

Steve's also doing two readings. One in an AWP panel on working class writers from LA on Thursday morning at AWP, the second for the SANTA MONICA REVIEW on Sunday, April 6. We decided to fly both weekends instead of driving. Should be fun, I hope.

My interview with Naomi Cohn about her innovative, genre-defying book from Rose Metal Press, THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA, was published in CRAFT today. Love this book for so many reasons, so it was great to talk to her via email.

As a writer engaged in a hybrid project that combines different voices and genres, I felt validated by her remarks on hybridity: “A piece of writing can be all these things—sometimes memoir, sometimes a collection of individual poems, a single coherent long poem, a lyric essay. It can move back and forth, shifting form.” 
 
And what she says about voice (Sonya Huber’s book also inspired me to stop worrying about the multiplicity of voices in THE LUNATICS’ BALL): “I really resonate with Sonya Huber’s assertion in Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto that we shouldn’t be limited to a single creative voice, that we need a multiplicity of voices to accurately reflect the complexity of our experiences.”
 
And this: “Why should any of us, as writers, limit ourselves to a smaller toolbox?”  

I just heard from a new reader who bought THE MISSING GIRL in preparation for assembling her own chapbook and found it powerful and meaningful for her own work. A response like hers is worth more than I can say. (Also, I just heard from Sarah Fawn Montgomery that she admires my flash cnf and learned a lot from it. Her researched hybrid memoir QUITE MAD is such an inspiration for THE LUNATICS' BALL!) I know that prospective publishers and agents want to see gigantic platforms, but it's the individual readers that mean so much to me.  THE MISSING GIRL was published in 2017. It's amazing that people are still reading it and that it still resonates. Glad that Black Lawrence Press has kept it easily accessible. Feeling moved and grateful.

Halfway through the #flashfictionfebruary event at FICTIVE DREAM, my flash "No Better Time Than Now" is out. This sendup of an overbearing, ineffective therapist is in fact based on stories from a writing group member, my husband, and something that happened to me, though the character is made up. 

So pleased that editor in chief Laura Black accepted work from me again (the seventh year running), and as ever I love the artwork from Claudia McGill.

After years of work, THE LUNATICS' BALL is ready for the outside world. Sent it out today to one of my first choice publishers. It feels different hitting "submit" on Submittable for a 92,000-word manuscript than it does for a longform essay or story or flash.  A leap into the unknown.

My flash "The Chair" is out in South Florida Poetry Journal (known as SOFLOPOJO). (Scroll down. The flash are in alphabetical order, and there are lots of friends and stars in this lineup.) A big thank you to Francine Witte (resident of Manhattan, not Florida). I was startled to see that a late-marriage breakup and the husband's chair figured prominently in another flash I wrote. There's nothing autobiographical about the flash, or the wing chair. BUT my father's wing chair figured in an essay I wrote (and rewrote, and rewrote) for DO IT YOURSELF NIGHT, the essay collection I'll turn back to when I get THE LUNATICS' BALL launched.

The voice and the runons and the defiance of grammar was fun in "Teachers' Pets," published in DOES IT HAVE POCKETS? A big thank you to Camille Griep, who gave me a chef's kiss for the ending.

My first time in both magazines. Love both of them.

Advice from two K-12 teachers that I've somehow never forgotten. A high school teacher, Mr. H, told me I'd be an excellent student when I learned how to apply myself to tasks I didn't want to do. As I procrastinate about building my 6-week flash class and learning the online platform, I realize that I never did learn that. I put Mrs. W.'s advice (sixth grade, I think) into the "Teachers' Pets" flash. I needed to learn how to take a compliment, she said. As the two flash rack up praise on Facebook, I immediately discount it. Steve says I always do that. Another lesson I haven't learned.

DOES IT HAVE POCKETS? did a nice graphic for the flash:

​A spacious airbnb this weekend in a woodsy area 15-20 minutes from Auburn. Unfortunately it's been raining buckets and the hot tub is outside so I haven't even tried it. Getting lots of work done, though.

I don't have many forthcoming pubs, and of course two of them are coming out on the exact same day. DOES IT HAVE POCKETS? will publish my microflash sequence "Teachers' Pets" on Saturday, and SOFLOPOJO (that's SOUTH FLORIDA POETRY JOURNAL) will publish my one-paragraph flash "The Chair" on Saturday as well. And I'll be away. Steve's going to a retreat in Auburn, and we'll both stay at an airbnb in the woods nearby. With a hot tub. I'm bringing work (but, hey, there's a hot tub).

This is one I'd honestly forgotten. Grateful to Will Woolfitt for letting me know that he's teaching "My Saints" from DUENDE in his fiction-writing class at Lee University this semester. He's also taught various nonfiction flash of mine in the past. I'm a big admirer of his poetry, stories, and essays, which makes it even more of an honor.