Not feeling sparkly like I usually am when sharing my publications due to the horror we have witnessed and the glaring awareness that police implement unchecked and abusive power whenever they please, but here is a story that came out today that I wrote five or so years ago from The Absurdist, a journal of wonderfully strange stories.
Devoted editors find ways to connect during the lock-down. Dean at Juke Joint Magazine has been holding Instagram Live poetry readings, and by golly, I’m part of it. See me read two poems. I’m a real person! Weird.
The Revolution (Relaunch) is back and publishing voices that speak to the hard stuff. I’m pleased to say that my voice has been heard.
Let’s see what happens. Maybe I’ll make it to the shortlist. Maybe not. But even if I don’t, can I say how happy I am to be here? To stop and take it in? The editors at Tarpaulin Sky Press included my collection, There and Here, in their 2020 Book Awards Longlist. That’s enough for now.
Hurray! My prose poem, “Phoenix,” has been mentioned honorably and chosen for publication in TulipTree’s Wild Women story contest.
Two fiction pieces, one fabulist & one slipstream, were lovingly accepted this morning from Gingerbread House and Gone Lawn. Both pieces were written in 2016, both speak of girls and birds, and both I lifted from dusty shelves, wiped off, and set free in hopes they would find a home.
So pleased to have my prose poem, “GED,” accepted by Juke Joint Magazine, a publication that upholds a spirit of defiance.
Sometimes, you just want to throw all the joy out there: fat roses and exclamation points and my two prose poems in a thirty-year-old print journal that has published the likes of Charles Bukowski, Marge Piercy and William Stafford. Thank you so much, Chiron Review, for liking my prose poems enough to want to print them. Coming your way: “Apartment Move #4” and “Apartment Move #5” in the Winter 2020 issue (or a subsequent one, if they can’t squeeze them in).
So excited to announce my new literary journal, Club Plum. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Send me astounding flash fiction. Send me dreamy art. You will be loved and among a select few. I will publish only remarkable pieces, or I will publish nothing.
Come to the house party.
Since major publishers are hardly publishing literary novels these days (read about it here and here and here and here), I’ll soon be spending most of my writing time writing short stories–just like I was doing years ago. For the last six years, I’ve been writing novels in hopes I could get one published by a major publisher. I’m finally ready to let that dream die. I can’t fight the market. I can’t conjure readers into existence. Readers are doing other things now–they are scrolling and binge-watching. And the readers who are reading have so many choices, and most of their choices are driven to their view by careful and pointed Amazonian marketing and other big-money-for-few-books marketing tactics. But that is okay. I will still write the occasional novel and send it to small presses (one never knows), but it’s time to go back to my old friends, literary journals. I visited them a couple of years ago and was welcomed with opened arms as they swooped up my flash fiction, one story after another. All these years–almost three decades since I discovered them–and they are still there, still here, and we fiction writers need them more than ever.