My first Substack post! I'm planning to post more about THE LUNATICS' BALL, which I won't duplicate here. I started with an illustration of the lunatics' ball at the Blackwell's Island lunatic asylum in 1865. (The subject of one of the early essays in the collection.)

AMAZING NEWS that I’ve known since Thanksgiving, but the acceptance had to clear a university press committee, the holidays intervened, and I wanted to wait until I had a signed contract. It’s official. I signed the contract yesterday.

(In the interim, the manuscript was also named one of twelve finalists for another really great book prize, winner to be announced in the spring. I just withdrew it, but I appreciated the added vote of confidence.)

My book THE LUNATICS’ BALL has been named first runner up for the Gournay Prize and will be published in 2027 by Mad Creek Books (the literary imprint of The Ohio State University Press) in their prestigious 21st Century Essays series. 
 
I am so grateful to the prize judges and series editors Kristen Elias Rowley, David Lazar, and Patrick Madden. I've already had a long Zoom call with Kristen, who will be editing the manuscript, and I love knowing the book will be in her capable hands. (Deadline for edits and permissions, April 1.) I'm grateful to all of the writers who supported the project, and in many cases, critiqued essays as I assembled the book, And to all the editors who accepted individual essays for publication.
 
Still catching my breath.
 
On the 21st Century Essay series:
"This series from Mad Creek Books is a vehicle to discover, publish, and promote some of the most daring, ingenious, and artistic nonfiction. This is the first and only major series that announces its focus on the essay—a genre whose plasticity, timelessness, popularity, and centrality to nonfiction writing make it especially important in the field of nonfiction literature. … The series is a major addition to the possibilities of contemporary literary nonfiction, focusing on that central, frequently chimerical, and invariably supple form: The Essay."
 
This is my dream publisher and series! They’ve published some of my favorite essayists. I already own many of their collections .
 
On my collection. 
My genre-bending essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball explores my two bipolar breakdowns and my bipolar aunt’s suicide within the expanded context of female lunatics in past centuries and the history of the treatment of mental illness in women.

I'll post more about the collection on my Substack, this week and in the coming months.

I love Will Woolfitt's essays, and I'm always gratified to hear that he's teaching mine in his classes at Lee University. He's taught a number of them over the years, and this semester he's teaching "Another Mary Doyle," inspired by Sonja Livingston's "A Thousand Mary Doyles," which he's also teaching. 

Here's the list he sent me, which makes me nostalgic for teaching: 
F 1.23 — Personal Identity & Names Readings: "Being Brians" – Brian Doyle; "Girl" – Jamaica Kincaid; "Where I’m From" – George Ella Lyon; "The Name of God" – Anya Silver M 1.26 — Family, Memory, & Collective Legacy Readings: Description handout, "’N’em" – Jericho Brown; "The House on Moscow Street" – Marilyn Nelson; "A Thousand Mary Doyles" – Sonja Livingston W 1.28 — Historical, Social, & Cultural Naming Readings: "Narrative: Ali" – Elizabeth Alexander; "Miscegenation" – Natasha Trethewey; "At the Cemetery, Walnut Grove Plantation, South Carolina, 1989" – Lucille Clifton; "Another Mary Doyle" – Jacqueline Doyle

​I looked up my essay (naturally) and I see that the family portrait is no longer included at the head of the essay., which is too bad. Interesting to see that I use the combination of speculation, fiction, and nonfiction that I also use in THE LUNATICS' BALL.

Did I report that THE LUNATICS' BALL is the first runner-up for The Gournay Prize at Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press? Really exciting news that I can share. Here's the winners' list.

Just got more good news yesterday that I can't share, and more good news last month that I still can't share yet.  

Here's what I posted on Facebook instead of my usual year-end link to a longer summary on my author website:

"Very grateful to Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press, where my manuscript THE LUNATICS’ BALL was named first runner up for the Gournay Prize. Grateful also to the following magazines for publishing my work this year: Hunger Mountain, NUNUM, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, FlashFlood Journal, Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets?, and SoFloPoJo. Grateful to Assay for reposting my essay there, to Claudine for a review of my chapbook THE MISSING GIRL, and to Flash Boulevard for publishing the micro included in the 2025 Wigleaf Top 50 longlist. Very grateful to W.W. Norton for including “The Lunatics’ Ball” in the textbook THE LAB: EXPERIMENTS IN WRITING ACROSS GENRE, and to Cornerstone Press for including my essay in the anthology THE PAST TEN. Participating in their reading was the highlight of my AWP, along with seeing so many writer friends, some for the first time in person. Thanks also to writers and editors who included me in readings in San Francisco and online. Thanks to all of you for your support and your own publications. You are a light in this year’s darkness. May you all prosper in your lives and creative endeavors in 2026."

If I'd had more space, I would have mentioned the interviews I did with Naomi Cohn and Grant Faulkner for CRAFT and also how gratifying it has been to work with authors and my great colleagues at CRAFT. How inspiring and supportive my writing group The Leporine Conspiracy has been.  My forthcoming work in LUNCH TICKET, CLEAVER, AND NERVE TO WRITE. 2025 was a very good year! Amazing really.

I can't seem to get the hyperlink feature on the website to work today, but I have some screenshots of my flash monologue "Your Perfect Day," just out in the innovative Canadian journal NUNUM, which combines art and text.  The artwork with mine is by Angel Dionne. 

NUNUM just wrote to me that they're nominating "Your Perfect Day" for BEST MICROFICTION! I'm not sure whether that's for this year or next year. It's not out yet, but it will be included in their Winter 2025 issue, so maybe it's coming out sooner than I thought. Right now I'm struggling with their difficult interview questions (at least difficult to me). They want contributors to make up some of their own interview questions as well, which should make the interview easier, but I don't have any great ideas today.  NUNUM is a very cool, small, Canadian, online zine that pairs graphics and art with text. 

I'm bursting with news I can't disclose yet because it hasn't been announced. So I'll wait for that.

This morning I woke up thinking about tonight's reading in the Mission and wondering how hard it's going to be to park. I'm looking forward to reading the title flash from THE LUNATICS' BALL. I got up and opened my email to a rejection of a piece that was accepted in the next email.

CLEAVER accepted my nonfiction micro "Faceplant"! It's about the pretty catastrophic fall I suffered a few years ago (when I had to give my talk for SUPERSTITION REVIEW with the camera off because I still had two black eyes). It's the only time I ever had involuntary flashbacks about an accident and I really wanted to describe that. 

I know Kathryn Kulpa, the flash editor at CLEAVER, so I wasn't sure it was okay to send it there. When I queried in advance, she said that she'd assign it to two other readers. She named the other readers in her acceptance. I really like CLEAVER and published two of my favorite nonfiction flash there a long time ago.

And my strange hybrid medley "Some Come Back" came out in BENDING GENRES today. I never showed this one to my writing group, since it seemed too odd, too much a product of my obsession with Poe (dating back at least to my PhD, when I wrote a 600-page dissertation on Poe and the American modernists, but probably back to childhood). I published an article on "Berenice," the least well-known of Poe's women, in Poe Studies.  I conclude my Bending Genres hybrid with her: "l admit it. I was obsessed with Berenice’s teeth. Obsessed. I abstracted them. Okay, I extracted them. I inadvertently buried her alive, but the toothless hag clawed her way out of her grave. Who knew she’d be back?"

(1919 illustration of "Berenice" by Harry Clarke)

I love Claire Polders' Substack "Wander, Wonder, Write," really a series of essays (not just blog entries or travel pieces) written during her nomadic travels. She's a prolific writer (memoir, novels, essays, flash) and also a prolific reader who recently recommended her favorite fiction from this year's reading, and today her favorite nonfiction.  THE LUNATICS' BALL heads her list of twelve books (eleven of them published) in "2025 Best Books Part Two: Nonfiction and Hybrids"!

The Lunatics’ Ball by Jacqueline Doyle
"Let’s begin with a book that’s… not yet published. If you’re lucky enough to have talented author friends who trust you with their work in progress, you may get to read amazing books long before they’re available to the public. This was the case for me when I was given Doyle’s masterful book The Lunatics’ Ball. It’s a riveting memoir on her bipolar disorder—the discovery, the struggle, the acceptance—and a lyrical, sometimes speculative exploration of how women throughout history have dealt with their mental illness and how men and the medical establishment have mistreated them horribly. The book is also much more than that. I have every reason to believe that The Lunatics’ Ball will be published in 2026 or 2027, and when it does, you’ll hear about it from me again!"

My San Francisco writing group read most of the flash and essays in THE LUNATICS' BALL,, some more than once as I revised them, but my husband Steve and Claire are the only writers who read the book from beginning to end after I completed the manuscript. Claire's critiques were so helpful! (Steve's too, always.) I am so grateful to her. And I'm grateful that she included me in today's Substack.

I also read her memoir about an eldercare crisis with her father-in-law during the pandemic, which is beautifully written and I'm sure will find a publisher. Her flash collection WOMAN OF THE HOUR, recently published by Vine Leaves Press, is wonderful. (It's on sale at the moment, and would be a great holiday gift.)
​
I have a Substack that I started so that I could read other people's Substacks and have never used. (That is, I see a few posts there that I must have "re-stacked" by mistake as I was learning how to use it.) I just followed more people to get more followers as I'm about to make a big announcement that I've been sitting on since just before Thanksgiving. Bursting with the news, but I don't think I should say anything until it's been announced. I'm ecstatically happy.

Looking forward to reading at the launch for Sasha Vasilyuk's paperback on December 9 at the Sycamore in The Mission. 

I was just invited to participate in a nonfiction journal editors' panel in Hannah Grieco's essay-writing intensive class at The Writer's Center, 2:15-3:15 on Saturday, January 31.

And I'm sitting on news so amazing that I still can't believe it. I shouldn't share it yet, but soon. A great Thanksgiving gift.

Nice coffee today and lunch yesterday with a fellow writer, Patricia Q. Bidar, and my fellow CNF editor at CRAFT, Shara Kronmal, here from Chicago for her son's wedding. We correspond all the time, but I've never met Shara in person.

While I was reading two great micros that Patricia published today, I was interrupted by Olga Zilberbourg's post for the December 9 reading at the Sycamore, then Sasha Vasilyuk's request for a bio for the reading. I'll post the flier below.

And then I was interrupted by an acceptance from BENDING GENRES for "Some Come Back," a strange medley/riff on Poe stories that I just sent them yesterday. I had no idea at all where to send such a strange composition, or what genre to call it. Hybrid, certainly. It will appear in their next issue, in December.