Top secrets of 2011

A very literary baby boy is due today, but then so are final projects for my class, and I bet those are gonna be late, too. Thinking good thoughts about little no-name-yet.

Speaking of the final project, this year I'm a genius. Instead of requiring a revision, portfolio or self-evaluative essay, I made my students interview each other--Smokelong style. The results, so far, have been amazing. NEVER have I enjoyed grading so much.

I'm also finishing up my reading my reading for my Wigleaf long list picks. In a year when I did not publish individual short pieces, I've felt a little untethered, but going through the year's output for these amazing online journals (I'm responsible for about 67?) reminds me how good and vital the art of vsf really is.

Let's see . . . 12 more days left in 2011. Still time to suck up, you know?

West Coast Beckons, plus mentions and reviews

Off to San Francisco's City Lights for a reading Wednesday the 9th, and then to Seattle's Elliot Bay Book Company for a reading on Friday, the 11th. Both with start at 7pm. Love this mention about the Seattle reading: "Scott's Death Wishing is about a world in which wishing actually does something for a frickin' change." I've never been out to these parts of the country, so forgive my ignorance, but I have two questions: 1) They don't really call it "Frisco," right? And 2) Will Seattle folk get upset because I can't stop humming the opening theme to Here Come the Brides? I was a huge Bobby Sherman fan, thought David Cassidy was sleazy.

Jen Michalski wrote some gorgeous thoughts about Death Wishing over at her blog last week:  "With the commercial fiction market often saturated with sameness, I'm always excited when I read something so completely bizarre and engrossing."

I stumbled over a very nice review by Diane Pinckley over at Nola.com--she wasn't completely convinced by the ending, but she did dub Death wishing a "fun fantasy captures the feel of this unique city."

Finally, the relentless Tara Laskowski interviewed me at Art and Literature. It was big fun.

New Story at Smokelong! (look at me using only one exclamation pt)

SLQ lives! and my ghost story "Last Seen Leaving" is in it, accompanied by a marvelous photo by an old friend, Jason Ellison. Be sure to click on the image for the full deal, so good. My Bio talks about the story as coming from my collection-in-progress, which was true then, but Curio made Pank's Little Books shortlist this year and is now out at a couple of publishers for consideration. There's also an interview where I try to pick a fight with the usual suspects.

Big thank you to Tara Laskowski who encouraged me to submit "Last Seen Leaving" to Smokelong. I wouldn't have thought to do so. & then shortly after, she took on an editorial role at SLQ, so that meant she helped me get the story into the shape you see now, including the title.

The Chronicler is a figure in a few of the stories from the collection.

Mason Alumni Appreciation Workshop & Reading

So this Saturday I'm running this thing--I'm always hearing from graduates that now they are out of school, they feel untethered to a writing community. Even though there are plenty of readings and workshops locally, I think a good portion of our former students would like a little more help entering a scene, and I totally get that. I cooked up this idea after the Dzanc workshops in March, although our thing is not so much a fundraiser simply because all the money we've raised is going toward paying the small group facilitators, and maybe some lunch for me, Tara Laskowski, and Art Taylor.

Our thing will go like this:

10am--Poet Wade Fletcher will talk about Metro area opportunities and resources, like readings series, workshops, festivals, etc. He's very good at this, having helped run the Cheryl's Gone series as well as Mason's Fall for the Book festival.

103am -12 Workshop session one

12-1pm Lunch discussion with me, Art Taylor, and Tara Laskowski. The topic is writing after Mason, or as we more delicately put it on the flyer, "Writing After Graduation." You know Art from his mystery & crime fiction, his blog interviews, and his reviews in the Washington Post. Tara's got a ton of great stories out there and is now an editorial force at Smokelong Quartery.

1-2:30pm Workshop Session two

2:30-4pm Free & Open to the Public
Readings by Joe Hall, Mel Nichols, and Kyle Semmel. They'll each read about 10-15 minutes, so we will use the rest of the time for an "open mic," prioritizing the workshop participants. Of course I have no mic set up at this time, so it may just be a shouting event.

If you want to come out, the reading will be in the Johnson Center Bistro (lowest floor in the JC). Parking is free on the green areas of this map:
http://parking.gmu.edu/pdf files/parkingmap09.pdf

Everyday Genius Line-Up, March 8-12 2010

Gonna be a weird week at http://www.everyday-genius.com/

Monday

You are less attractive than I am. If panties are to be wetted for this, then I will be the master of the waterworks

—from Ben White's "Milestones"

Tuesday

an unending landscape of glue and glue and glue

—from Tara Laskowski's "Day 72"

Wednesday

Those were some muscles he had and Sally Potawatomi wanted to eat them

—from Gabriel Orgease's "For Three Days They Were Not Able to Identify a Body That Had No Arm"

Thursday

They measure her body for the sake of the artists, then they build a barge and sail her corpse east

—from Danny Collier's "Ouch" & "His fortune gone . . ."

Friday

You may find her grunting on the floor, in the manner of a goat, to find what she let fall and roll under the table

—from Donna D. Vitucci's "The Woman"

giggle, snort

Just found out that one of my students has had a piece accepted at Dogzplot. No details yet, but I hope it was a flash. (update: yeah a flash, a durned good one)

Mel Bosworth says I'm "super nice" for having him talk about chickens at the vsf blog. I'd rather be super fine, but I'll take what I can get. Related to being ordained super-nice, my friend Danny forced me to choose a super power, so I'm going with "indifference to fragility and rarity of antique objects."

Finally, Tara Laskowski, Scott Garson, and I are newsletter famous together as we hog up 1/3 of the Fall 2009 "Between the Lines" Mason MFA alumni thingie with blather about how very short fiction is coming to your house to break your heart. I don't know if it goes online, but if I find it I'll post a link. You know how to find us, but did you also know that Tara is one of the hungry minds behind The Recipe Resolution?

Free Online Fiction Writing Course (Part 3? 4?)

Howdy! Taking a break from writing my syllabus to take a break from writing my syllabus, so I have a couple of minutes to Tell You The Good News About Indie Lit! Seriously, I've only been a consistently active participant in the scene for about a year and a half, and already the questions--online vs. print, micro vs. macro--seem old and non-productive sometimes, like going to a big family picnic where they find out you're an English professor and you get all those loud question-attacks from Uncles who are proud to be ignorant. Crimey/Noiry/Southerny fiction writer and reviewer Art Taylor gets it (for reasons a light cyber-stalking will reveal), and he is enthusiastically in the business of explaining it to diverse and curious populations, reminding me that my presence at the picnic might be useful after all. Art is in the process of putting together a brief piece for the George Mason community about new fiction, for which he has interviewed Mason alums (Me, Scott Garson, and Tara Laskowski).

Of course, these days I don't need to explain much to my advanced fiction writing students about what's going on, and the unit descriptions in my syllabus are really for the salary committee more than anyone else.

Here's an inappropriate answer I gave to one of Art's questions about writing big and small (I'm pretty sure I stole the image, but from where? And DE, did I use this gag at the conf panel?): Think about seeing a clown in an emergency room with a BBQ fork in his thigh. That's one narrative experience, about the observer's immediacy. Now think about that clown as an abused child who grew up to flunk out of the police academy and has just discovered he has "feelings" for his best friend. That's an entirely different narrative experience, using the exact same base material. Oh, and neither one is poetry.

New stuff at The Northville Review . . .

. . . knocked my work off the front page. That's okay though, because my good friend Danny Collier is there explaining an inside musical joke

Also I hear Tara Laskowski will have work at TNR soon. Tara, Danny, and I all work at the same Uni, so it's kinda neat that we're all messing in Erin Fitzgerald's sandbox.

Aside from excellently bent work featured in TNR, this is one of the few lit sites that I can reasonably access on dial-up, which is my weekend situation.

What do Prez Obama and Tara Laskowski have in common?

They both had a good day.