pub in gooseberry pie, and a cover FOR THE LUNATICS' BALL!!!

I'll wait until preorders are available (in early October, I think) to do a cover reveal on Substack and social media, but I can't resist posting the cover for THE LUNATICS' BALL here. 

cover art: James Diaz, "Ophelia Mutation"
cover design:  Melissa Dias-Mandoly

Juliet Williams, the Production Manager at Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press was great to work with, and I was so pleased that the team at the Press agreed to use the art I wanted.

I know James Diaz as the editor of the online zine ANTI-HEROIN CHIC, where I've published. He does wonderful surrealist collages, which you can find here. This one was published in KHORA, the "dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with groundbreaking author Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing" (recently dissolved). The weekend workshop I took with Lidia several years ago produced a flash and part of a short essay included in THE LUNATICS' BALL.

​I looked up Melissa Dias-Mandoly and she has a website with some interesting collages herself.  The Design and Production Manager at the University of Pittsburgh Press, she also does freelance cover designs that have been featured in ELECTRIC LIT and LIT HUB.

From macro to micro news: I have a six-sentence micro out in GOOSEBERRY PIE today. "Why Not?" might be the shortest microflash I've written.

Working hard on the interview I volunteered to do with Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, editors of the forthcoming Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay. I finished the book, which I really like, but it's not so easy to formulate questions for the editors, since I can't really engage with the essays they included, just their introduction.

​I say yes too easily. At least I turned down an invitation to co-edit an anthology of flash creative nonfiction, also for teaching, which is a great idea and I imagine would have turned out to be tons of work.