I have a piece up today at the great
@3ammagazine
-- I hope you'll give it a read
"Some memories come back only because I’m writing; I wouldn’t otherwise remember them. I have to write them down before I remember."
Unfortunately, upon reading your submission we fell asleep for fifty years; when we awoke the village was filled with strangers, we ourselves were sapless and infirm; we are therefore unable to accept it for our upcoming spring issue
My cat is deeply interested in water and glass. He has an obsession with the physics of optics. He has a poetic sensibility. He divines the source of the Double, a realm of number beyond our perception, hidden in the phenomena of mirrors. Heck of a cat if you ask me
University presses, man. It took me a year and a half to learn that one of the books I translated was awarded third place in a translation prize…and only because I looked it up
The March issue of
@PitheadChapel
is up and I’ve got a story in it; hope you’ll give it a read and take a look at the other work in this excellent journal!
“By then it was nine, ten years. He’d never been to Navy Pier...”
Cleaning out a prof’s office. Many forgotten poets, his contemporaries, in typed pamphlets, paper fragile, type fading, often unread. Reading now and then, they sound very much of their time, that of Vietnam, even when they imitate older, less dated work. They sound far away
There’s a journal out there that keeps following me, unfollowing me when I follow back, gets unfollowed when I notice, and then starts the whole cycle again. Hilarious but also what
Pleased as the living punch to see my story "Mouse Mouth" get a Best Small Fictions nom from the extremely cool
@trampset
alongside all these excellent writers
Had some great writing news too, though, which I don’t usually share, but hell… Two of the journals I love and respect the most, some of the very first to publish me, have accepted longer pieces that’ll show up in April and June and I couldn’t be happier
Delighted to have a story at
@NewWorldWriting
—they were not making it up about moving fast; hope you’ll give it a read, it’s short and about moving home
Friend starting MFA program just asked me about conferences, grants, awards, workshops, retreats, writing groups…and I had to explain that I didn’t go to a program, have absolutely no clue about any of it, and will die a pauper, unshriven, wretched, my bones disdained by worms
Unfortunately your submission drove us from paradise; now we wander the death-haunted earth, sowing and reaping, living by the sweat of our brow, while the angel at our backs denies us forever the immortal womb of Eden. We are unable to accept it for our upcoming issue.
Simenon: “It is rare to encounter people who do not play a role, even when they are alone. Most men feel the need to watch themselves living, to listen to themselves speaking.”
Honestly kind of shaken by the 3Penny thing. They know their system doesn't work. They still tell you they'll confirm. If you inquire, you get yelled at. If you resubmit, you a get a vicious letter from the EIC. Fellow writers, comrades...no journal is worth that.
If you’ll forgive my oversaturation, here’s one more story this month—and in one of my favorite publications, the always-excellent
@ErgotPress
Hope you’ll give it a look
So strange that when you lose someone you truly love, they at once feel infinitely distant and almost on the cusp of presence, as if you only need to get through one thing before you can see them again
Dialogue is the most artificial and decorative stuff--I like it, don't get me wrong--it's the most fantastical element in writing to have clear sentences pop out of human mouths when in fact when we actually do talk to someone it's mainly a lot of tenuous grunty gibberish
I always feel like I've blundered when I veer too deeply into autobiographical territory. For me, one of the real pleasures of writing fiction is the ability to distort, erode, annihilate my memories, opinions, personality.
Nearly accepted a charming little piece for the journal I’ve started to help edit…only I just discovered it was published by four other journals since September!
Something I notice about contemporary Anglophone novels I find dissatisfying (there are many) is a seemingly deliberate lack of atmosphere, which leaves them feeling flat and characterless. Style, a conveyor of atmosphere in itself, often appearing only in scattered wry remarks
Li Po was the first poet I really cared about, while Tu Fu only spoke to me after my mid-twenties or so. Now I prefer Tu Fu, but I can't help missing the way Li Po felt so completely present for me when I was young; it's as though he moved on from me, too.
Dreamed I was very tall and made of branches and at night I could walk about and in the day I slept scattered through forests. All in all, not a terribly bad dream, if—I’d say—leaning a little toward the fabulist
Three short pieces up today, courtesy of the excellent
@slicesofanxiety
—
“Daytime is nighttime for them, night is day, and I suppose that’s how they go on, doing what they did living...”
new piece up in the lovely
@bodylit
today:
“I wanted to draw, not write … but that was impossible: my trees were shapeless blobs, my insects were necklaces with too many beads, my oceans, triangles impaling clouds that dripped snow or rain…”
Moved to say that in addition to the consistently top quality work they publish,
@ErgotPress
,
@LigeiaMag
, and
@MinorLits
will always stand out for their gracious and meticulous editors, their kind and generous communities, and a support that stays tangible long after publication
Piece up today at the beautiful
@ooo_astrolabe
—
“The old dead and gone live in a block of apartments on South Beall. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t recognized one, an aunt of mine, checking her mail...”
I have a short piece up today on the never-sufficiently-praised
@MinorLits
: deep thanks to
@TobiasvRyan
an excellent writer, supportive editor, and all around good guy
I have a piece in the
@CincinnReview
MiCRo series today! Hope folks enjoy. I also recorded the story, which involves canned hams, so if either of those things appeal to you—hams in tin, the human voice—give it a listen!
Got a bunch new acceptances in Timber Stream Quarterly, Eel Flash, Fearful Delusion, Crackerbarrel Review, Wagon Load, So Long Attack Spaniel, and considerable other publications
I have a little story up at
@sepiaorg
this morning—
“My parents are sick. I wheel them from window to window. They don’t want to sit by the same window… They’re never satisfied with the familiar. The familiar is precisely their ailment.”
Really just takes getting up and looking at my phone for three seconds now for me to commence my daily rotations in a bottomless maelstrom of horror and loathing for our country and government
I really ought to be focusing on work but alas I have acquired a passion for reading about and staring at pictures of tenth century hogback tombstones. Just look at these sluggy bastards
Sometimes, in bed with a book, I'll start to drift off and read sentences, whole passages even, that in my state feel plausible, and certainly comprehensible, but when I snap awake they won't be there; often I'll miss them, too, as if they were a necessary dialectical component
The cat didn’t go bananas but I found that eclipse pretty eerie, ghostly, etc., and if I was a decadent novelist of the 1890s I’d feel compelled to get very morbid and grandiose about it
The many books I have read that are now complete blanks in my memory, mere covers and blurbs sandwiched between books I recognize and drift through the instant I see their titles
Two qualities of early Irish and Welsh literature I’m particularly fond of: the deep love of repetition, and the tendency of freshly severed heads to offer ironic remarks or last-minute puns as they bounce through the grass
New piece today at one of my faves,
@hexliterary
—
“I figured out walking through walls. As in walking down them. As in they open into corridors and aren’t tight at all…”
Deep thanks to
@DanTheDadBodGod
@_katemcintyre
& Joe Aguilar!
New piece in Issue 1 of
@frwell_trans
— check it out and give them a follow!
“This is your new brother, said Mom.
We adopted him….
He was an old kid, probably thirty: I was nine.”
I have a piece at the wonderful
@trampset
today. Deep thanks to
@jedwardkruft
for taking this!
“I don’t remember how to spell her Norwegian name, but it means Mouse-Mouth, and I picture her as a low raincloud pushing through ferns, electric within.”