It Was Always June

I’ve heard poet friends say that they never have a moment free in April, because National Poetry Month means ALL the readings and conferences and workshops happen in that one month. June is sort of like that for Flash Fiction writers. There’s the Bath Flash Fiction Festival and National Flash Fiction Day (June 15th, the day before Bloomsday), and it’s also the start of summer writing conference season, so the past month has been a whirlwind of write-o-rama for me. Starting at the end of May, I went to Houston, Texas for the Writefest Conference, sponsored by Writespace, where I taught a weekday flash fiction workshop May 27-30 and took part in two panels at the weekend conference that ran from May 31-June 2. Oh, and I also led two mini-workshops. And there was a reading in there, too!

And before I could even recover from the jet lag, it was on to a Fast Flash Workshop with Kathy Fish, where I got to be a student again and wrote, wrote, wrote for 10 days straight. Lots of new work in the queue!

“Jessie knows the only way to move ahead is to burn your bridges, and she’s got matches to spare.”

Read the rest at New Flash Fiction Review.

I was also thrilled to be invited to contribute a flash triptych to New Flash Fiction Review, a magazine edited by flash writer Meg Pokrass. My story, “Jessie’s Life in Three Surnames,” was inspired by some genealogy research into my great-grandmother and her three husbands.

One of my stories got to swim in the Flash Flood for National Flash Fiction Day, June 15, 2019. A new story was released each hour throughout the day.

Then, a story I read in Houston, “Why I Got Written Up by the Manager at Uncle Earl’s World Famous Bar-B-Q,” was published in 100 Word Story. I love the discipline of writing stories this short (always knowing that you can cheat a little, because the words in the title don’t count)!

Meanwhile, I had agreed to write a craft essay for Superstition Review, which was published on their blog.

“I wrote in first-period algebra, when I compared Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring to the search for the square root of a quadratic equation, and the search for the equation didn’t come off too well.”

Read the rest at s [r] blog

All that–and it’s still June!

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