In which I struggle against my Midwestern roots and do a little bragging despite the hurt it causes.

May 9, 2011

It’s always triply exciting to win something you didn’t even know you were up for. So I was pretty stoked to learn that I’d made the Wigleaf Top 50 List of Very Short Fictions (selected this year by the lovely Lily Hoang, with long list help from Scott Garson and Ravi Mangla.) with one story, and made the long list with two others–and even more stoked because these three pieces (“The Dictator is Drinking Alone” in Annalemma, “Feral Children: A Collective History” in The Collagist, and “May We Shed These Human Bodies” in Art Voice. Thank you Christopher, Matt, and Greg, for originally publishing these pieces.) There are so many good writers on the shortlist and the long list, and so many wonderful fantastic amazing stories. Some of these I’ve read, some I’m just reading now, some I’m not familiar with at all and am eager to read. I’ve been reading the Wigleaf list for years now, learning my craft from the best of the best (or at least trying to) and so its unbelievably cool to see my own name on that list. Happy happy.

Tyler Gobble and Layne Ransom have put together this unbelievably cool little magazine as an offshoot of Stoked Press, and have launched it into the atmosphere with an excellent first issue that I am honored to be a part of. My story, “Some of Our More Useful Planets” appears, with awesome graphics that I most certainly did not, could not create. Thanks, Tyler and Layne–your enthusiasm and dedication to indie literature is pretty much boundless and you deserve some serious props for that.

Finally, trnsfr Issue 4 is out and it is one hell of a gorgeous magazine. I have a story in here, too; thank you to Alban Fischer for including “The World After this One” in this issue. You should get this baby now and also you should help out with funding for Issue 5 at this Kickstarter project because this really is a labor of love and a work of art, every issue.