Summer reading

Winter writing, summer stories, and "Danielle Steel of flash fiction" anxiety

Last year, when I was talking with some writer friends about publishing and rejection, one writer who works in both flash and long-form prose commented on how hard it can be to keep up with everyone’s publications. Most of us are part of both local, real-world writing communities and a looser, sometimes worldwide community of flash writers online, and it can feel like every day there are dozens of new stories to read and comment on.

On the one hand, this is a good thing (all that creativity out there!), but on a practical level, I worry (as a reader) about missing someone’s best story because I got overwhelmed by social media and decided to take a social media break for a few days; I also worry (as a writer) about over-saturation. If I publish too often, will I be seen as “too much?” The Danielle Steel of flash fiction?

Case in point: it’s the second week of July, and I’ve already published four times: flash in Ghost Parachute, microfiction in Claudine and Okay Donkey, and now a poem in Second Coming. I’m not trying to glut the market, and the timing wasn’t planned. The pieces were all written and submitted at different times, but sometimes, that’s how it happens.

So I’m listing the “July stories” here, with a few words about each one, and you can read some (or all) on your own time.

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“Boys will be” in Second Coming:
This was a surprise, published the day after it was accepted and only a few days after it was written. Second Coming is a “poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime,” and you can subscribe to them on Substack, as I do.

“Winter’s Tales” in Okay Donkey:
These two micros, “That Winter” and “Overwintering,” saw publication during one of the hottest summers on record, but they were written during an unusually cold winter. “That Winter” channels the defining weather event of my childhood, a ‘nor’easter,’ as they call it, that shut down schools and just about everything else in New England and still causes panicked bread-and-milk runs in our neck of the woods whenever the forecast calls for a few flakes of snow. “Overwintering” is part of a longer work of climate fiction. I’m really grateful to Steve Chang and the OKD team for asking me to send a companion piece to go with “That Winter” and for working with me to edit both of these.

“The Last Time We Saw Jennifer” in Claudine:
I always knew I wanted to have something published in Claudine, with its elegant feline guiding spirit, and I was pleased when this dark microfiction made the selection. It was originally written in March, but it also lives in a place where it’s always Halloween. Inspiration: I did have a “witch club” as a kid, and someone once threatened to expose my “secret language,” but the rest of the story is fiction. Promise.

“Secondhand (Jessie, 1913)” in Ghost Parachute:
This story was inspired by some family history delvings during my stay as a writer in residence at historic Queset House in Easton, Massachusetts this spring. (More on that here.) I’ve always found my great-grandmother Jessie a fun heroine to write about, in spite of because of her ‘bad girl’ aura, but a discovery I made during my visit reminded me how much sorrow and loss she must have carried. I love the striking illustration artist Kaylan Stedman Friedman created for this story. She’s illustrated quite a few of my stories, and her work is always gorgeous; this piece is especially haunting.

I’m happy to say I have another story about Jessie coming out in Gooseberry Pie; that one is a ghost story, and it will be published, fittingly, in October.