Bryan Furuness (of "Ballgrabber" fame, one of my favorite Hobart stories of all time) recently asked me to send out a call for submissions for Booth, the literary journal he edits for the MFA program at Butler University. Bryan wrote that they're "looking for fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and quirky lists . . . basically everything. Apparently, we're the only lit mag in America not drowning in submissions." Do what you can to make Bryan regret his words by sending them a submission today. Booth is a nice-looking journal to read, and Bryan's a great guy who will definitely treat your submissions well. Go submit!

Kim Parko's Cure All is the newest release from Caketrain Press (my publisher for my novella The Collectors). I've really enjoyed read Parko's work, and I'm looking forward to seeing this book both for the text, which I'm sure will be great, and also the design, which--judging from the cover--once again raises the bar what a small press book might look like. Joseph Reed is one of my favorite cover artists and book designers, and once again he's outdone himself with Parko's book.

In hopes that it'll entice you as much as it enticed me, here is an except taken from Parko's "Learn," available in the PDF sampler for the book:

I was diagnosed with failure to thrive so my mother took me home and put me under the grow lights. I spent my younger years among the chlorophyll-skinned. When I finally grew a sprout from the top of my head, it was time for kindergarten, but I only knew how to communicate through photosynthesis and was mocked or ignored by the other children. Daily I waited to get home and sit under my lamp and idly grow toward the false sun with my seedlings.

I was diagnosed with fire blight. They put me in a basement room all day and I came home cracked and wilted. Mother worried about my health and upped the dosage of fertilizer. When I entered grade school the principal was made weary by my size relative to my intelligence. “These are dangerous times,” he said.

You can order Cure All here, for just eight dollars including shipping. If you're on the fence, remember that last year, both my novella and Tina May Hall's sold out very quickly. So don't delay! I've yet to be disappointed by any Caketrain publication, and I'm confident that streak is going to continue here.

My story "The Receiving Tower"

Here's the beginning of "The Receiving Tower":

Most nights, we climb to the tower's roof to stand together beneath the satellite dishes, where we watch the hundreds of meteorites fall through the aurora and across the arctic sky. Trapped high in the atmosphere, they streak the horizon then flare out, with only the rarest among them surviving long enough to burst into either mountains or tundra, that madness of snow and ice beneath us.

Once, Cormack stood beside me and prayed aloud that one might crash into the receiving tower instead and free us all.

Once, I knew which one of us Cormack actually was.

Again, you can read "The Receiving Tower" online for free, but afterward I hope you'll strongly consider subscribing to Willow Springs, which is one of my own favorite magazines (recently publishing Blake Butler, Kim Chinquee, the first excerpt I saw of Robert Lopez's Kamby Balongo Mean River, and so on). Editor Samuel Ligon is also one of the very best editors I've ever worked with, a statement I've tried to back up with a just-posted guest entry in the Emerging Writers Network's "Experiences with Editors" series, in which I said (among other things):

I can see now that Sam was the ideal reader and editor for this story: He understood my goals for it completely, and was able to articulate those goals back to me better than anyone else who had read it so far or has since. I truly believe that it would be a lesser story if it had been published by anyone else... I can’t thank Sam for taking the time to read my work so carefully, and to encourage and develop it throughout our interactions this last year. I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of great editors over the past few years, but there’s no doubt he’s one of the very best.

Thanks again, to Sam and everyone else at Willow Springs! Everyone else, I hope you enjoy the story. Thanks as always for taking the time to read my work.

For those whose concerns are too ungainly to speak I light this candle. For my sister and her child at the Carlyle Motel—even though my house is open. For my Daddy, who'd scorn this mention of him, who'd crush the little worm of shame before it got to his head. He's old, he's old. Yes, brother, but he is alive. He stands on the boards of his porch before dawn in shirts that smell like cumin. For him, and for all of you listening, I position the flame like so.

David McLendon, editor of Unsaid, which also published some of these shorts, blurbed the book, saying that “Garson's collection reads like a travelogue of the periphery. These are plainspoken reports from a different way of seeing. Not only do these brief assertions of poetic language appear to have been composed while the author was in transit—they seem each to be a form of motion itself. Garson has done us all a great service by containing the motion of his America in the book you now hold."

Convinced yet? You can buy a copy of Scott Garson's  American Gymnopédies for just ten dollars by clicking here. Don't wait too long-- My Willows Wept Press chapbook sold out in pre-orders, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Scott's book do the same. I'd order yours today.

Here's the beginning of my story, as a teaser:

For the first crime they took only my thumb. Afterward they refused to talk about it, even after I confronted them, after I tossed their bedroom and confiscated the hatchet hidden in their toy box, beside their miniature gavel. When lined up and accused beside her sisters, all the oldest would say was that my trial had been fair, even without my presence: One daughter for a judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense.

My middle daughter, she spit onto what was left of our thread-worn carpet, said my defense had been particularly difficult, considering my obvious guilt.

She said, Perhaps you should tell our mother you cut your thumb at work, so that she will not have to know why we took it.

I'm excited to be included alongside so many other excellent writers, but I'm also happy to be back in a magazine edited by Sheldon Lee Compton and Jarrid Deaton. Sheldon published one of my very first stories in print, when he was editing another new journal called Cellar Door. That story--called "Fireworks"--was part of the first serious writing project I ever worked on, a novel-in-stories that I never finished (although two other stories from it appeared later, in Hobart and Storyglossia). Those early votes of confidence really meant a lot to me, and I've never forgotten. Thanks again, Sheldon.

One danger of writing a dispatch from the moment is you don’t know what is going to happen next. I continue to fear for the safety of my friends in Haiti—I am afraid to hope too much—and I plan to return to the country as soon as flights resume to see them with my own eyes and to offer whatever help I might. For now, I offer an excerpt—the story of Fabby’s kidnapping— from a book now less close to being finished. The village of Callebasse must be rebuilt. The ill and injured must be tended. The dead must be buried.

In a few weeks, the international media will leave the country, and Americans will be free to forget about Haiti once again. It is my hope that this story will give American readers a glimpse into the lives of people I have come to love in Haiti. We must not forget them.

--"A Kidnapping in Haiti" by Kyle Minor, published today in The Rumpus. Absolutely essential reading.

My story (and novella excerpt) "Kidd, Kier, Kimball" has been published in Alice Blue 10, thanks to the kind editorial skills of Sarah Gallien and the rest of the staff there. Alice Blue has been putting out great issues for a long time now (in internet time, at least), and I can still remember the first pieces of writing I read there (the excellent shorts "Geography Lesson" and "The Passport Thief" by Magdalen Powers), back in their Winter 06 issue. Since then, it's been one of the internet magazines whose issues I look forward to most, and so I'm very happy to be a part of this newest one.

Here's the beginning of "Kidd, Kier, Kimball":

Another new rain falls, dumped from the complicated sky, its acid-heavy droplets plummeting to pelt our shoulders as we run from awning to awning, from collapsing home porch to crumbling chapel steps. Along our way, we see every kind of bird upon the ground, all heavy with forgotten flying, and around them their mud-left eggs, as thin-walled as my wife's uterus, that tender thing trapped inside her unsafe body.

Within it, within us both, sound always these trapped prayers, necessary to be loosed.

I hope that after you read my my story you'll also check out the rest of the issue, which includes work by Ofelia Hunt, Andrew Borgstrom, Matthew Simmons, Kathy Fish, Sasha Fletcher, P.H. Madore, Jon Swan, Joseph Young, Kimberly Ruth, Michael Sikkema, Jack Boettcher, Mara Vahratian, Nicole Pollentier, J.R. Walsh, Theodore Worozbyt, Maged Zaher, J.P. Burnside, Jordan Stepleman, Olivia Cronk, Matt Morris, Gareth Lee, Julia Cohen, A.K. Scipioni, Thomas Cook, Tyler Dorholt, Jac Jemc, Marcia Arrieta, John Chavez, and Chris Theim. Thanks again to Sarah and everyone else at Alice Blue for letting me a part of the magazine.

I said at the beginning of this review that the trajectories of each of these pieces are carefully calculated, and they are, but in a way that eschews collision. In the end, the parts dance around each other with the persistence of a Swiss watch, meshing together with geared teeth. And I think that while those teeth do draw real blood on occasion, this collection has a true heart and belief that we can reach out to each other, even as it challenges us to examine our ideas about the way we communicate and interact.

I really appreciate Stevens' take on the chapbook, and can't thank him enough for taking the time to write about it. Be sure to check out the rest of FlashFiction.Net, where Randall Brown has cultivated a fine destination for daily guest posts on the craft of flash fiction and reviews of flash collections.

One year my first brother hatches, another year my second. The second dies. I come later and for a while am called The Gift, The Child, The Girl. My mother tells a story: Once upon a time your brother's membrane turned to ice. His incubation went frigid, his fragile skin cracked in high-pitched splinters. She shrugs and looks away, behind her, so her body's scales pull from their maile layer; what shows beneath is the vulnerable pocked skin, the fact of blood there, right below the surface. We couldn't save him, she says quietly. When we extracted, he broke to pieces, his yolk sac a butterscotch skidding from reach.

--"We Swim Away" by Sarah Norek, in Caketrain 07

It's been a busy week for publications already, but add one more to the mix: My story "Lakin, Lamia, Lakshmi" has been published as part of Knee-Jerk's January 2010 issue. The issue also includes the next in a series of excerpts from David Shield's Reality Hunger (which I read late last year and really enjoyed), as well as an interview with Porter Shreve, a very funny review by Brandon Will, and non-fiction by JM Huscher.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from the beginning of my story:

Remember how you were too weak to hold her weight for the first months of her life, how the only way to feed her was to bring your breast to her buried mouth, instead of the other way around? How at bath-time we would have to stretch her skin tight so the other might wash between the furrows, so that together we might clear the lint-slop between, might scrub off the mold that grew in every hanging crevice?

Remember the surgeons advising operations to remove the excess skin, to suck out the fat around her eyes, so that she might be able to see? From around her ears, so that she might be able to hear? How you hated the doctors for trying to decide in what ways our daughter could be beautiful, how she should see the world, and how the world should see her!

No, you said. She will eat what she wants to eat, until she fills out that great skin of hers, until she stretches it taut, until jagged lines of purpled flesh mark new territories upon the body of her person.

I've been very impressed with what Casey Bye, Stephen Tartaglione, and Jonathan Fullmer have done with Knee-Jerk over its first seven issues. The David Shields excerpts in the last few issues are what got me interested in reading Reality Hunger, and I've enjoyed a lot of the creative work they've published (like this, this, and this). I'm very happy to be a part of their first issue for the year, and I'm excited to see what 2010 brings for the magazine. They're off to a very good start, and I'm sure there are great things to come.

"Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo," an excerpt from my recently completed manuscript Cataclysm Baby, has just been published at the online magazine FANZINE. Normally, I'd post the beginning of the story to try and entice you to give it a read, but I think this time I'm going to let the artwork do the trick: FANZINE matched my "Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo" with two pieces of art by the painter Joshua Hagler, whose work is a great fit for this story (and the project as a whole). Check out the story, then be sure to explore Hagler's site as well, as he's an excellent artist whose work I'm incredibly intrigued and excited by.

Thanks to Ben Bush for publishing this excerpt, and for the good work he does with the rest of the magazine. He and the FANZINE staff have created a unique and well-designed publication, and I hope you'll add it to your internet rounds. It's got a great mix of content, and everything there seems very ambitious. I'm looking forward to watching it continue to grow.

I smile at her, saying nothing. In her face I try to see my father’s, see my own. I can’t. Her face is too thin and pale, wearing the mask of death. Instead, I see the face of our cat, which died when I was a teenager. Also, strangely, I see the face of my sister, who had two kids when she was a teenager and then grew thin and pale and light, like her bones had been sucked of their marrow.

The last time I saw Johanna before this night was at my sister’s baby shower. Johanna had driven up north in a pickup truck, her oxygen tank in the back. She was plumper then, almost healthy, wearing a red blouse, vivid, the color of blood in the movies. She wore shorts, too, and her legs were coltish, like my legs when I was a child. She gave my sister frilly baby clothes, and gave the rest of us presents too, one for each year she hadn’t seen us. They piled up on the deck like the mountains surrounding us, like the mountains in which she would die. The mound of presents hid her from our view, and by the time we saw her again she was diminishing, beginning to say goodbye.

 --"Butterfly Shadows" by Jacqueline Vogtman, in Emprise Review 

Today I'm an English butler. Sort of a hybrid of Igor and Oliver Twist and Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day. Jane and Sylvie come in in the afternoon and they're the only folks in the place, so I stride over to them and wring my hands and ask them, will it be fucking burgers today, mademoiselles? Jane and Sylvie love that shit, because I am somewhat of a simian performer to them. And they're like, oh, yes, sir. And cheese cubes. And I respond, very good.

Some people don't react. Like, I'm all deferential to the mayor. I use a terrible approximation of an English accent when I serve his pie. Yohh pie iz suhhhved. And he just looks at me and digs in. I mean, does he notice the accent? He has to notice it.

--"English Butler, Ohio" by Bess Winter, in JMWW 

But when you hang up the phone, your smile is smug. Paul would never have numbers in his glove compartment. Paul is open and honest, and he tells you every single detail of his day—from the popcorn kernel he found stuck in his back molar this morning (It's probably been there since we left the theater last night! he shouts) to the Facebook message he got from an old high school friend this afternoon, some girl named Marla.

And even if you did find a number, you would assume it was the number to the dry cleaner down the street, or to his accountant's office. It is tax season. You are not the jealous type.

--"Baggage" by Anne Valente, in JMWW