My story "Dredge" has just been published in Hayden Ferry Review 45, alongside new work by Timothy Archibald, R. S. Armstrong, Bernardo Atxaga, Karina Borowicz, Emily Carr, Matthew Cooper, Margaret Jull Costa, Jenny Yang Cropp, Beth Dow, Donald Dunbar, Israel Emiot, John W. Evans, Samuel Forsythe, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Mark W. Fry, Miles Fuller, Forrest Gander, Jeremy Griffin, Hong Hao, Lilah Hegnauer, Sean Patrick Hill, B.J. Hollars, Preston Hood, Marcus Jackson, Mark Klett, Aljaž Kovač, Sean Lovelace, Joseph Mains, Darren Morris, Naveed Noori, Lee Norton, Joshua Robbins, Mary Ruefle, Erika L. Sánchez, Kendall Sand, Brenda Serotte, David Shook, Adelice Souza, Kelly Spitzer, Aleš Šteger, Sarah Steinke, Laura Stott, Víctor Terán, Bradford Tice, Brendan Todt, Padma Viswanathan, Daneen Wardrop, Marcus Wicker, and Leah Zazulyer.

Here's the first paragraph of "Dredge":

The drowned girl drips everywhere, soaking the cheap cloth of the Ford's back seat. Punter stares at her from the front of the car, first taking in her long blond hair, wrecked by the pond's amphibian sheen, then her lips, blue where the lipstick's been washed away, flaky red where it hasn't. He looks into her glassy green eyes, both pupils so dilated the irises are just slivered halos, the right eye further polluted with burst blood vessels. She wears a lace-frilled gold tank top, a pair of acid wash jeans with grass stains on the knees and the ankles. A silver bracelet around her wrist throws off sparkles in the window-filtered moonlight, the same sparkle he saw through the lake's dark mirror, that made him drop his fishing pole and wade out, then dive in after her. Her feet are bare except for a silver ring on her left pinkie toe, suggesting the absence of sandals, flip-flops. Suggesting something lost in a struggle. Suggesting many things to Punter, too many for him to process all at once.

I received my contributor's copies late last week, and have been enjoying the excellent work inside ever since. I've always liked Hayden's Ferry Review, but the last few issues have been particularly strong (especially their "grotesque" issue, which I wrote about here). I'm very happy to be included in this newest one, in part because when I first started submitting to literary magazines years and years ago, HFR was the first magazine to ever send me a personal rejection instead of the standard form letter (for my story "Rest Stop," which was eventually published by Hobart). I can still remember how excited I was at that page full of small handwriting with its unfortunately unreadable signature. I'll probably never know who the editor who wrote that letter was, but that was a much-needed bit of encouragement when I was first starting out. I've never forgotten it, even though I didn't submit there again until this past year when I sent "Dredge" their way.

I'd like to thank managing editor Beth Staples for her kind correspondence throughout the process of considering and publishing this story. Beth is one of my favorite people in the lit mag world, and working with her and prose editors Brian Lee and Arijit Sen was a very enjoyable experience. I hope you'll help me thank them for all their hard work and effort by subscribing to the magazine, which I can guarantee you is well worth the very reasonable cost. If you need further convincing, be sure to check out the web content drawn from this issue, including two fantastic fictions by Sean Lovelace and Kelly Spitzer.