Amy Marques's beautiful art object/anthology DUETS + 1 is here, with flash reprints and excerpts from so many flash writers I know and admire that I can't list them all here.  I was thrilled when Amy solicited work from me and decided on "Doppler Effect," which originally appeared in MIDWAY JOURNAL. Her art is amazing.

Actually a micro-memoir sequence on teachers' pets, which I just revised, so I'm glad it was the most recent version that was accepted. It will come out in DOES IT HAVE POCKETS? sometime early next year. Love the magazine.

It's gray and blustery today, which I normally wouldn't like, but it's a nice change for the Bay Area and for my thirsty garden (what there is of it). Turning out to be a great day, in fact.

The SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest took reprints as well as original work, and I sent in a few on the very last day. They just announced the long list, which includes one of mine! According to their email, that makes it one of the top 41 out of 1170 entries. It's not new, but I'm pleased nevertheless. The micros are still being judged anonymously, so I won't supply the title yet.

What a great Prose Garden reading yesterday! My reading starts at 29:07 on the linked YouTube video, but it's worth listening to the whole reading! There were a lot more people than you can see in this screenshot. So many flash luminaries read: on the top row, Francine Witte to my left, Meg Pokrass, Mary Grimm, and Cheryl Pappas to my right. next row down: Kathryn Silver-Hajo, Kat Gonso, Lynn Mundell, Pamela Painter, Jeff Friedman. And on the far left of the third row, my associate editor at CRAFT, Shara Kronmal. Lots of great flash writers in the audience too.

Back when I was hired as the first CNF editor at CRAFT, they were brainstorming about adding classes to our offerings. I was hoping I might get to teach something, but the parent organization ended up developing an online program for all their magazines with outside teachers. Now something better has landed in my lap. I won't say more about the invitation until it's realized, but it's exciting. Probably more work than I expect, but pretty ideal. (Note: I had a five-out-of-five star horoscope in the newspaper today. )

Pleased to be reading in Meg Pokrass and Francine Witte's PROSE GARDEN reading series on November 16.

​Register here to attend (it's free).

Until a few minutes ago, this was a pretty bad weekend. Pre-election anxiety. Really intense pre-election anxiety. No outcome to the election would surprise me at this point. Then a conflict at work over the kind of issue that really pushes my buttons. Then, when that was resolved, the most colossal technological mistake I've made at work (accepting changes in Google docs that the author hadn't seen yet), requiring quite a bit of labor from the editor-in-chief and another editor to solve. Just when I was ready to write this off as a particularly shitty weekend, I got an acceptance from Francine Witte, the flash editor at SOUTH FLORIDA POETRY JOURNAL, which despite its name actually publishes great flash. I've been thinking that "The Chair" has had a lot of rejections, but in fact it's had four. Really nothing, but I'm very easily discouraged these days.

Four years ago ALTERNATING CURRENTS PRESS accepted a microfiction of mine for their anthology THE TERTIARY LODGERS: An Anthology of Fiction from the First-Person Viewpoints of Secondary & Tertiary Classic Characters. The pandemic arrived. The anthology didn't. I figured it was no longer going to be published. But ALTERNATING CURRENTS just redid their website and the anthology appears under "Coming Soon + In the Works." Which I take as a good sign. My microfiction imagines Nippers' take on Bartleby and was fun to write. 

Just visited Jill Talbot's "Essay Form(s)" class at the University of North Texas via Zoom, which put me in the actual classroom, so instead of seeing a lot of individual faces I was seeing a semi-aerial view of Jill at a desk in front of the class, her students clustered around tables. The closest I've gotten to a classroom in  several years! Their questions were not what I expected, but all interesting: writing about real people, choosing details in portraiture, incorporating literature in my essays, writing groups vs. solitary writing.  I've been a big fan of Jill's writing for years, so it was great to meet her in person (virtually). Over the years she's let me know that she's teaching my work ("Little Colored Pills," "Haunting Houses"). So nice of her to invite me!

I told her before class that "Little Colored Pills" was written before I started THE LUNATICS' BALL, and to doublecheck that I did a chronology of my LUNATICS' BALL pubs and discovered that I've been working on it for five years (it feels like longer), that I wrote "Little Colored Pills" two years before I published it in 2019, when I published the title flash for the book and a number of others, probably with the collection in mind (I'd envisioned a chapbook, with fiction as well as nonfiction then). Jill asked me to read "The Madwoman on BART," which was published in 2020 and refers to my reading on Vivienne Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald, so my research was well underway at that point. Last week, for the first time, I printed out the entire manuscript: 375 pages (no preface or bibliography or acknowledgments yet), 91,969 words. The longest thing I've written since my 600-page PhD dissertation years ago. I'm reading the hard copy now.

Jill just wrote to me (some really nice comments from students, in both her invite and thank you) and gave me a few stills from the recording. I'll post a couple here.

Two cover reveals this week: THE PAST TEN (Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point), edited by Bailey Gaylin Moore, Donald Quist, and Kali White VanBaale, and THE LAB: EXPERIMENTS IN WRITING ACROSS GENRE (W.W. Norton), by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante. THE PAST TEN will include an essay I wrote for the series earlier this year on my heart diagnosis and what I was doing ten years ago.  THE LAB will include my flash "The Lunatics' Ball" along with my statement about hybrid genres. THE PAST TEN comes out in the spring, I think, THE LAB in July. 

Mixed news about Jill Talbot's textbook/anthology ESSAY FORM(S) (Columbia University Press), which is supposed to include "Little Colored Pills." The publisher wants her to make it much shorter. It sounds like such a great project. I was looking forward to reading it and I hope it's still on.