IS THAT YOU, JOHN WAYNE?

I should say some basic things here.

My book of stories--IS THAT YOU, JOHN WAYNE?--is forthcoming from Queen's Ferry Press.

I've been working on these stories, and on this book, for a while. I'm all happy on it. It's better than I am. Lots better.

The individual stories range kind of wildly in length-- from 25 words to about 12,000. Most of the stories first appeared in journals: New Orleans Review, New Ohio Review, New York Tyrant, No Colony, Kenyon Review, Redivider, Carolina Quarterly and others.

The collection is lucky to have ended up w/ a great editor and advocate, Queen's Ferry's Erin Knowles McKnight. Am thrilled to be on the list there w/ some super-fine writers: Corey Mesler, Kristine Ong Muslim, Bayard Godsave, Michael Nye, Kevin Grauke, Elizabeth Frankie Rollins, Ethel Rohan, Phong Nguyen and others. The collection's also lucky to have found its way to cover designer Jason Hieronymus.

Okay. That's all for now.

Wait. Release date! (Spring 2013)

Goodbye, elimae

Some of you have heard that the current issue of elimae is the final one. I feel like we should be making more of this! elimae was a pioneer web journal—started up by Deron Bauman way back in ’96 (when most people still didn’t have email accounts, when you had wait long seconds for each web page to load). Under Bauman and subsequent editors (and super-fine writers) Cooper Renner, Kim Chinquee and Brandon Hobson, elimae specialized in a kind of fiction that was more or less disappearing in New York. Gordon Lish’s final year at Knopf was ’95, and New York was starting to narrow down to the two types of literary fiction it could hope to do profitably: moral entertainment and authorial spectacle. elimae did neither. Under Renner’s stewardship, the journal solidified its reputation for a distinctive sort of fiction—tight, minimal, sentence-aware, often very short (under three hundred words). As a reader, I didn’t always love everything I found in elimae, but I was always excited to read through the monthly issues. I always felt like an elimae story might find a way into me, changing my brain or the way I saw fiction or life on earth…

Laura Ellen Scott's DEATH WISHING

Still tying up loose ends from '11....

Death Wishing: a fave read of the year. Here's my Amazon take on it:

This is a good book in lots of ways—but one really basic one: when you set it down, after finishing a section, it’s going to call you back to it; and when it’s over, you’ll miss its people—maybe a lot. Scott’s narrator, Victor, is a piece of work. Lives with his kid, works for his kid in the back of his kid’s vintage clothing shop. As for which one of them is the more together individual, it’s kind of an open question. But he’s a wonderful narrator—really wonderful, with a touch that’s warm and amused, sometimes sardonic but never closed off. With Victor as narrator, Scott’s able to deliver some knock-out prose. And with Vic as our guide, Scott’s New Orleans becomes—for me, at least—something like a recurring dream: a twisted, innerly glowing place, one that follows a logic you don’t fully get but will recognize, still…..

Wigleaf 2011 (Props + Thanks)

Cezarija Abartis
Krammer Abrahams
Steve Almond
Kate Axelrod
Kyle Beachy
Lauren Becker
Lena Bertone
Michael Bible
Robert Bradley
Ryan W. Bradley
Craig Buchner
Amy Butcher
Kate Hill Cantrill
Brian Allen Carr
Doug Paul Case
Lucy Corin
Christy Crutchfield
Shome Dasgupta
Tim Dicks
Claire Donato
Trent England
Ashley Farmer
Michael Fischer
Kathy Fish
Jane Flett
Jen Gann
Rachel B. Glaser
Luke Goebel
Amanda Goldblatt
Carissa Halston
Casey Hannan
Kyle Hemmings
Frank Hinton
Jessica Hollander
Tim Horvath
Joanna Howard
Emily Howorth
Lindsay Hunter
Ashley Inguanta
Travis Kurowski
Catherine Lacey
Molly Laich
Suzanne Lamb
Jeff Landon
Catherine LaSota
Sean Lovelace
Ling Ma
Lacey Martinez
Tara Masih
Courtney Elizabeth Mauk
LaTanya McQueen
Rob Mentzer
Brian Mihok
Greg Mulcahy
Edward Mullany
Darlin Neal
James O'Brien
Brian Oliu
Ellen Orleans
David Peak
Adam Peterson
Jennifer Pieroni
Glen Pourciau
Sam Rasnake
Ryan Ridge
James Robison
Andrew Roe
Nicholas Rombes
Jim Ruland
Joanna Ruocco
Ann Rushton
Niloo E Sarabi
Ben Segal
Gregory Sherl
Curtis Smith
Lauren Spohrer
Angi Becker Stevens
Terese Svoboda
Robb Todd
J.A. Tyler
Valerie Vogrin
Chelsea Laine Wells
Bonnie ZoBell