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.

Took a great workshop with Sarah Freligh yesterday, which I enjoyed, even though it was at 10am, early for me. I managed to write to the three prompts, even though I often have difficulty writing to prompts right away (Kathy Fish's overnight assignments work better for me). Nothing I can imagine rewriting for publication, but I loved experiencing Sarah's teaching in a Zoom class, and the examples from other writers and Edward Hopper paintings that she chose. Here's one that Kim Addonizio wrote a great poem about: 

I feel like I've been having fruitful exchanges with other writers online. Should I start using my substack (started just so I could read others; I must have restacked a few things when I didn't know what I was doing!). No. Reading substacks has added a lot of time to my social media scan in the morning. I'm going to have to think about how much time I spend on that now.

There was a wonderful launch event for THE LAB on Tuesday night at The Booksmith in the Haight, where I got to touch bases with a current member of my writers' group (Sasha Vasilyuk) and a past member of my writers' group, Matthew Clark Davison, whose book we were celebrating. I'm so honored to have my flash "The Lunatics' Ball" and a craft essay about hybridity and their writing prompt  based on the flash in the book. And to hear from Matthew that teaching the sequence has gone really well!

Today the fifth of five installments on their book in LITERARY HUB came out, this one on the important question of finding a container for what you want to express, and there's a paragraph on my hybrid manuscript-in-progress:

"In The Lab, we share excerpts from Jacqueline Doyle’s project The Lunatics’ Ball, which is the title of her book-in progress, a hybrid memoiristic text that focuses on women who lived in psychiatric hospitals. Parts of the project also illuminate the history of psychiatric hospitals—formerly called “lunatic asylums”—in ways a publisher might categorize as “historical nonfiction.”
When her own and her family’s history with mental illness needed space on the page, she added sentences constructed with strategies typically used in memoir. Soon, however, the project moved fluidly to include what the writer dreamt, personas she invented, and even included bits influenced by her characters’ (reported or author-imagined) interest in music, syntax, and lyricism. Doyle said, 'It was a challenge…to write about the silenced, the hidden, the lost, and bring them alive on the page…' Her obsessions didn’t fit into any one narrative category, so she combined strategies from multiple genres and shaped them into something new."

I love the concluding point that they make after discussing a number of hybrid projects: "What connects all of this isn’t resistance to genre. It’s loyalty to what’s urgent. We cross forms not to break rules, but because the material won’t come alive any other way. Hybrid writing, when it works, is the opposite of casual. It’s what happens when the writer follows a line of inquiry past the known forms into something more precise."

I'm enjoying the whole book, now that I have a copy, and I wish I could teach a semester-long class with it! (I don't, however, wish I hadn't retired from Cal State.)

Finally I posted something on Bluesky that was read by more than five people, and it was an impulsive expression of irritation that a lit mag had taken two years to reject something of mine. Lots of writers commiserated! When I went to file the rejection yesterday, I discovered that it hadn’t been two years, it had been three years and one month!!! I never bothered to query, as it was a longform essay from THE LUNATICS’ BALL and at a certain point I decided a.) that many of the essays made more sense in the context of the whole project, and b.) that I’d already published more than enough from the project. Future publishers would prefer to see much of it unpublished.

A shout-out from Matthew Clark Davison. The title flash, “The Lunatics’ Ball,” was published in F(r)iction’s beautiful print journal, and then online by F(r)iction with a great illustration, and then in Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante’s The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton), which will be launched this week in San Francisco. There’s so much advance publicity for the book: articles/interviews in Writers Chronicle and Poets and Writers, a five-part series in Lit Hub, a week-long workshop based on the book in Mallorca. And now a podcast: “Exploring Hybrid Literary Forms,” in the "Otherppl with Brad Listi” series (July 19, 2025). Matthew closes the interview with a touching, lengthy comment on my shift from scholarly to creative writing and The Lunatics’ Ball project. Available Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube (section on The Lunatics’ Ball starts 50:00 on Youtube). 

Here it is:
“One of the writers in this book that really, really, really touched and moved me recently, I mean, I've learned so much from my students over the years, mostly just what you were saying, this is like I had some pretty serious and horrible things happen in my life that led me to want to write and to reflect with words and to get down a history whether it was fiction or non-fiction. I wasn't really worried about genre when I first started writing, but I needed to lighten up and I was a joyful person as a child, and life circumstances brought me away from that joy and I wanted to get back to it. I'd always really totally appreciated gallows humor and pain plus distance equals funny and those kinds of formulas in theory, but I wasn't doing that.

I'm trying to do that now and Jacqueline Doyle, who has a very compelling piece in this chapter, is working on this amazing project where it's called The Lunatics Ball, the piece that we published in the book and it's published elsewhere first. But she's working on an entire book where she just was an academic writer and she was sick of it. She has a PhD in English literature.

She was sick of it and she wanted to have more fun. But the subject matter that she was talking about, which was her own bipolar disorder, her aunt's suicide, a dearly beloved person that died very young at 47, in her life, the kinds of circumstances that were surrounding her mother's generation, deeply serious literary concerns and life concerns, that she seemed to just give herself full-fledged permission to imagine scenes of like, the lunatics ball refers to a actual dance that they used to have in an insane asylum, perhaps for what was called then an insane asylum, for perhaps what was a fundraiser. Then she's just imagining the characters there and including that in a lyric essay.

Each one of her essays is a little bit different from the one before it. I was in a writing group with her and that's how I learned about them. I've read all of her published pieces and there are several.

​I just thought, God, I could be having a lot more fun. I'm really trying to apply that myself to the memoir that I'm working on.”
 
From Otherppl with Brad Listi: Exploring Hybrid Literary Forms, Jul 20, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/otherppl-with-brad-listi/id472152554?i=1000718136565&r=3214
This material may be protected by copyright.

[Actually I've published more than several essays from The Lunatics' Ball, most of them before I met Matthew. One that I published in Permafrost got a Notable in Best American Essays. I've also published others in EPOCH, Passages North, The Collagist, and lots of other places. I also include a number of essays and flash that I published before even conceiving of the project.]

​I've seen the prompt in the book that they developed from my flash, but I haven't seen the whole book yet! Looking forward to the San Francisco launch at the Booksmith in the Haight on Tuesday night.

On Christal Cooper's blog, where she's done many interviews about short stories and poems and has just added essays to the genres she highights. My short interview about "Haunting Houses," where she's helpfully added links to the sources. The essay was originally published in print in NEW OHIO REVIEW. Later NOR posted the essay (link in interview) and BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS awarded it a Notable. 

Last day of the SmokeLong Archive Challenge, where writers choose a flash magazine that has been around for at least ten years and post their favorite flash from the archives. Four of mine have appeared on the lists:
"Little Darling," Wigleaf
"The Missing Girl," Vestal Review
"Head of the Household," Cotton Xenomorph
"Ready or Not," Gone Lawn

Travis Flatt called my pandemic flash essay "Ready or Not" a "frightening, relatable, grounding, prescient story." Rereading it now, it feels like it could be grounded in a new dystopia, the masked officers at the door frightening agents from ICE instead of friendly policeman, in a new era when marines are patrolling the streets, backed up by National Guard.—so far just in LA, but the pictures yesterday of giant armored vehicles and agents on horseback in MacArthur Park were shocking. The pandemic feels like a more innocent time.

I know I get more readers through social media, but it also feels very here-today-gone-tomorrow. It's great to know that some of my work gets read later, and that so many magazines have survived. I've been in lots of fine magazines that were here-today-gone-tomorrow themselves. Some I really loved (Jellyfish Review, elimae, The Collagist, too many to list). A lot of them didn't leave their archives online when they folded.

I've been sending out flash for submission recently, while I wait for more news on The Lunatics' Ball and a shorter hybrid manuscript I just assembled, The Arithmetic of Memory.  Thanks to Len Kuntz, who suggested at AWP that I should be putting my work together in collections, and Patricia Bidar, who suggested that you can publish older work. It's interesting to me to see how my themes persist and transform themselves. And I've really enjoyed reading past publications I'd half, sometimes completely, forgotten. Like meeting former selves.