shout-out for the lunatics' ball

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 Future publishers would prefer to see much of it unpublished.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.