Monday, May 30, 2011

Can I catch a break?

How about if plot is just time?

Thursday, May 19, 2011

shaping up

So here at Mason, May 21 is Graduation Day. This year that's also Judgment Day. I don't remember Judgment Day from last year, was there a lot of traffic?

I've known it for a while, but I'll be debuting Death Wishing at the Fall for the Book festival in September, somewhat ahead of the official release date of October 11.







Then at the end of October, I've been invited to the Louisiana Book Festival, to be held in Baton Rouge.






November 9 will be the City Lights reading.


I've got about four and a half toes in the door of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival for 2012. The Louisiana love comes courtesy of my friend and mentor, Darrell Bourque, who is just concluding his tenure as the Louisiana Poet Laureate. It also comes from Dorothy Allison, who blurbed the book and has been supporting my fiction for a while. They love her down in LA. I"m super excited about doing festivals, and the people who run them are so damn sweet.


So those are massive gigs, right?

Friday, May 13, 2011

Curio, reviewed by Ethel Rohan


Early this week Ethel Rohan posted a beautiful review of Curio on her blog. I am very grateful for her kind words and careful read, but also for her honesty concerning her reluctance to read the collection. She was worried that the stories included wouldn't be "storied" enough, an anxiety I share about many contemporary collections. It's definitely true that along with a few conventional narratives, Curio includes some pieces that as stand alone might seem fragmentary or even slight, but that's why I was so eager to get the collection out there. The pieces were written with dependency and accumulation in mind.

As a result of Ethel's kind attention, it looks like a new batch of folks have visited Curio.I hope they enjoy it.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Wigleaf Top 50 izzup!

So my Wigleaf Top 50 news is complicated:

1) I've got two stories on the long shortlist: "The Brewsters" & "Last Seen Leaving," which appeared in Moon Milk Review and Smokelong, respectively, and are also collected in Curio.

2)Next year I will be on the Top 50 team, along with Ravi Mangla and Greg Gerke, and the new guest ed. (I know who it is, but it doesn't look like Scott has made a formal announcement yet). Being part of the team means that I have been handed a massive list of sites to follow and pick through.

3) Though I didn't make the Top 50 this year, stories I selected for Everyday Genius and helped select for Prick of the Spindle did:

Roxane Gay's "Boys in Drag"

Barry Graham's "13 ways of looking at a roadtrip"

Simon Smith's "Things I've Eaten That I'm Not Proud Of"

Valerie Vogrin's "Apologies"

4) (takes big breath) Plus others I selected/helped select made the long list:

Erin Fitzgerald's "At Grayfield Keep"

Jen Michalski's "The Turn of Things"

John Minichillo's "Working Halloween for Christmas Money"

Cami Park's "When You Heard"

Congratulations everyone--it was a pleasure working with you!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Well alrighty. Galleys ahoy

Looks like the publisher approves the revisions, has completed the line edit, and is rushing the copy off to the galley printers by the weekend. I get passed by this go-round because we're a tad behind schedule, but that's fine with me. There'll still be time to work with the galleys.

Actually, they really liked the revisions, to the point of using four exclamation points to say so, and this makes me very happy.

Keep an eye out for Donna D. Vittucci's cameo appearance as a very friendly French Quarter waitress.