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.

Matt Kendrick, whose flash and essays and craft columns I admire, did the SmokeLong Challenge and chose COTTON XENOMORPH as his flash magazine. He posted my creepy ekphrastic flash "Head of the Household" as one of his "all-time favorite" ekphrastic flash. I've written quite a lot of ekphrastic essays and flash, but I think it might be my favorite too. (Also the Joseph Cornell essay, partly because it went through so many iterations.)

Getting lots of love from discerning readers for my new lyric essay "A Wild Goose Chase." It helps in this absolutely shitty time in the history of the USA.

I see I've been using this column mostly to count successes. Maybe because I know I'll need the psychological reinforcement later. Maybe because counting not-successes makes me nervous. What if a prospective publisher sees that something they're considering was rejected elsewhere? Will it influence them? Lots of rejections of my current flash at the moment. I managed to rally myself and send out a lot yesterday.

I think because I was pretty sure there were enough Republican holdouts so that it wouldn't pass, I feel blindsided that the shockingly cruel and inhumane and authoritarian bill passed in the House of Representatives. Heartsick.

So it's a good day for something light. My weird lyric essay "A Wild Goose Chase" is out in HUNGER MOUNTAIN. A magazine I've always admired, a wandering piece about reading Geoff Dyer (who is very funny) in our overgrown backyard. Also about geese honking, hounds baying, orangutans in Borneo,

Matthew Davison taught "The Lunatics' Ball" at a retreat in Mallorca last month, and now Robert Vaughan posted on Facebook and X and Bluesky about the first day of the Bending Genres retreat in France. They started with two POV flash: one of them was "Little Darling"! I'm always pleased when people teach my work.

It also came up in the SmokeLong Challenge to post ten favorites from the archives of long-standing flash magazines. Someone did Wigleaf and included "Little Darling," saying they frequently teach it. Someone else did Vestal Review and included "The Missing Girl." Both people I don't know.

A very good week for recognition. I should remember that when I feel like I don't have any readers. (I assume no one reads this, which is actually somewhat freeing.)

Steve and I spent a long weekend in San Diego (and Temecula, for a family party) and I took a last look at my laptop before we checked out of the hotel this morning and discovered that the WIGLEAF TOP 50 (VERY) SHORT FICTIONS shortlist and longlist were out. And that my micro "We Could Have" in FLASH BOULEVARD made the longlist! The micro is part of a CNF sequence ("I Dream You are Alive"). I've been longlisted with CNF before (though the list is supposed to be fiction). A completely unexpected honor. 

I'm so excited to be in a W.W. Norton textbook on hybrid writing. I don't have my hands on a copy of THE LAB yet! There were articles and interviews POETS AND WRITERS and THE WRITERS CHRONICLE about the book. Matthew Davison and his cowriter Alice LaPlante taught a workshop in Mallorca using the book, and I'm thrilled to hear this from him: 

"We have [an article] coming up in LitHub that talks about your contribution. We also did a session at The Lab Mallorca where we read The Lunatics Ball, your notes on why hybrid works, and did the series of experiments based on both. It may have been the students' favorite of my lessons."

There's a launch event at The Booksmith in San Francisco on July 22.