Great state election results nationwide (finally something to celebrate). I rushed through an acceptance at CRAFT of a CNF flash I'm in love with. Really really in love with. And I got an acceptance of a flash fiction from NUNUM today ("we love it, you popped our heads"), a fun Canadian zine where I published "Super Stanley" (also a monologue from a somewhat unreliable narrator). They were nice enough to nominate "Super Stanley" for a Pushcart and Best Microfiction. Here's the cover from that issue. Looking forward to the art in Spring 2026. Combining art and flash is their thing.

​More good news! CRAFT has two Notable Essay listings in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2025! Elissa Lash, "Twelve" and Starr Davis, "Pawn." So exciting for an online journal that just started publishing CNF five years ago. We've now earned seven Notable Essay listings.

My great CRAFT editorial assistant Amy Cook let me know that ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES posted my essay on Judith Ortiz Cofer from ages ago on their Instagram account today. (Amy has also published in ASSAY, an amazing online journal combining scholarship, pedagogy, and reflections on nonfiction. I wish it had been around when I was first teaching.)  A couple of hours later it occurred to me to look at their other social media accounts, and they've posted it on Facebook  and BlueSky too.

It's nice to see "Shuffling the Cards: I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer" get some new life. The series of eight academic notecards structuring the essay are not what I'd include today, but my narrative about my students and classes brought them back for me. It's interesting to relive that point in my life when scholarship/teaching/creative writing intersected, before I embarked on my new trajectory of writing/editing and left scholarship and teaching behind. I miss the students at Cal State East Bay. 

Here's what ASSAY says on Facebook: "This Pedagogy Monday, we’re highlighting Jacqueline Doyle’s essay “Shuffling the Cards: I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer” from Assay issue 4.1. In this piece, Doyle invites educators to re-deal the deck of narrative inheritance, examining how Cofer’s storytelling threads oral traditions, cultural memory, and generational change into classrooms. By using cards, metaphors, and shifting perspectives, she challenges us to help students shuffle through whose voice leads, how stories get passed on, and what it means to write from the middle of history."

​I love the illustration they chose:

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.

I've been working on the class I'll teach next month at the Flash Fiction Institute and I realized that if I give them multiple prompts each day, and ask them to post one flash for comment, then students will generate at least three new flash. So I changed the class description to "at least three flash" instead of "two flash." (changed in entry below also). Then I noticed that the offer of a 15% discount runs out tomorrow, so I posted ads for the class on my social media. I'm not sure how soon people will see it! I need six students minimum, which is not a lot, but there are a lot of other classes out there.

So pleased to have a flash in GHOST PARACHUTE today, a great issue with lots of good writers. My second appearance there ("Raining Blackbirds" was a long time ago). "Ella's Going Places" was inspired by a sign I actually saw in Los Angeles when I was there for AWP.

The flash required research into Gen Z (how do 20-somethings talk? what do they post, and aspire to post, on TikTok?). At my writing group's suggestion, I even researched names and discovered that my original choice (Traci) was not as common a name as Ella in 20-something girls from Kansas. It's hard changing a character's name when a piece has already gone through a few drafts! I even watched the Netflix video referenced by my Greek chorus, though I didn't use it!. The flash was fun to write, and revise.

GHOST PARACHUTE always commissions artists for each story as well as their cover. The moody, spooky illustration from Andrea Damic is lovely, and not what I expected at all. Maybe because LA is so bright, and the photo I have of the actual sign is so technicolor. I was going to send the flash only to magazines that used photos, but I'm glad I decided to send to GHOST PARACHUTE anyway, since they're consistently terrific.

Great cover, by Genevieve Anna Tyrrell.

More good news. We went on a week-long vacation in Washington State, first at an Airbnb on a farm in Anacortes, and then to San Juan Island, where we visited the poet Gary Thompson and his wife Linda. A very nice getaway. While we were there, Steve learned that he was one of thirteen finalists for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize at the Texas Review Press. Very encouraging, even though he didn't win.

The Flash Fiction Institute is now officially launched, a new enterprise  founded by Grant Faulkner, Meg Pokrass, and Tavia Stewart. They offer: *Virtual classes with accomplished authors
*Craft articles and coaching support
*Curated calls for submission and literary journal listings
*Monthly newsletters with famous prompts from Meg to stir the imagination

And they invited me to teach one of the virtual classes! They asked if I'd do a six-week class and I asked to do a weekend workshop instead. Still worried about mastering the technology involved (Canvas, not unlike Blackboard, but it's been a while since I've used online teaching tools). But I enjoyed teaching with Bending Genres, and this should be similar: a small group of good flash writers. 

Here's my class: "Creative Constraints: Invitations to New Flash with Jacqueline Doyle." 
In a Rose Metal Press panel at the 2025 AWP, four writers of book-length flash projects discussed how “creative constraints” (or “invitations” or “experiments”) allowed them to approach risky material, structure what had been unmanageable material, and generate new material they hadn’t anticipated. Flash itself, with its word count limits, acts as a creative constraint. Self-devised creative constraints in flash may include repetition, poetic forms in prose, hermit crabs, abecedarians, lists, one-sentence forms, braiding, and many others. You’ll come away from this online, asynchronous weekend workshop with at least three flash for further revision and ideas for more. This workshop is appropriate for both beginning and experienced writers. All writing prompts will be usable for both nonfiction and fiction.

October 18 – October 20
Asynchronous

After an interesting R&R suggestion from a good magazine that I wasn't sure what to do with, my flash "Ella's Going Places" was just accepted by GHOST PARACHUTE, a flash journal I love. Out in September.

Working on a longer project, I'd forgotten what placing flash is like. Rejections are far outnumbering acceptances, of course, but there haven't been all that many. It just feels that way! Maybe I'll retire a couple of the flash I have out on submission right now but it's very early days to decide that. When I told someone that I wasn't sure I had the stamina for sending things out anymore, they suggested that what's needed is patience, not stamina. So I need to cultivate patience.