New Work Accepted

2024 is off to a fruitful start—yet not so much new writing from this writer.

Pure of Heart came out in February in Fathom. A very sweet short story (14 min. read) about a simple girl, in terms applied from the past: a servant, who become ingrained into a family of middle-class means and how that relationship touches every member. I was inspired by Flaubert’s story "A Simple Heart".

A few weeks ago my piece The Yellow House appeared in both the print and online journal Of Rust and Glass. After reading Rachel Cusk’s novel Second Place, I was inspired to attempt something similar. The brilliance of the novel was that it kept the reader guessing, I kept thinking something was going to happen, perhaps a murder or falling out, something to reward the reader for reading to the last page. But nothing. A kind of bait and switch, or just baiting. In the end people disappoint us, we’re disappointing, the narrative is quotidian.  

Coin-Operated Press has accepted The Machine Wears No Clothes (a flash reprint) for their issue on sustainable fashion. Links will be published. The small press is out of the UK and seems to be a project of passion. From their website: We are based in Scotland, where we facilitate creative workshops, host zine fairs, manage the DJCAD Zine Library, create educational zine content, and produce, publish, and distribute collaborative zines every month.

Rock and a Hard Place Magazine has accepted my short story Zen Garden. Zen Garden was written soon after I came back to the Midwest from Oregon and was settling into my first residence, sharing a townhouse with a roommate in Okemos. Like any work of art there are some biographical details, but more broadly it is a story of fiction. The presses’ mission statement here: ROCK AND A HARD PLACE PRESS IS A LIT-NOIR PUBLISHER, FOCUSED ON STORIES OF STRUGGLE, TALES OF THE POWERLESS AND MARGINALIZED, CHARACTERS ON THE FRINGES OF SOCIETY … AND WHAT THEY DO NEXT. Zen Garden is scheduled to appear in Issue 11, devoted to the theme of Passages. Again I will definitely link when the issue becomes available.

All this to say—I need to keep writing and working on new pieces. Agents, if you are out there, I have several proposals and manuscripts available, Okay, you aren’t out there, at least for me, but editors please know I have work I’d love to submit! Meanwhile, I’ll keep chugging away—much like the character in Zen Garden, who slowly cultivates a new life while navigating the current bed of thorns (sheesh, a lot of metaphors there).