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.

Thrilled to hear from Robert Erle Barham at CURRENT that they have nominated my short essay "Shoplifting" for BEST OF THE NET.

My (very) short story "Petey's Own Personal Jesus" is out in ROI FAINEANT PRESS today!

BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS just wrote to inform us that Will McMillan's essay "How We Carry the Weight of It" will be listed as a Notable in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2024, out next month. I love Will's essay and feel very honored that CRAFT has been awarded five Notables in the four years since we started publishing CNF.

An invite from Francine Witte to read on September 21 in the online reading series she co-curates with Meg Pokrass, The Prose Garden. Looking forward to it.

Steve's reading in the Lyric and Dirges series at Pegasus Books in Berkeley in a couple of weeks. Then doing a fancy reading at Chico State in October, where he'll also visit a class. We'll spend a couple more days in the area. Should be a nice getaway.

later: Bummer. I had to pull out of the Prose Garden series because of a memorial service we're going to (two in one week: the mother of one our son's friends, the father of a former student of ours. Both alcoholism-related deaths).