Friday Bulletin Board
Resources, upcoming readings, recent interviews
Deadline! May 31! for Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (short story collection - 40,000-75,000 words) & for BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize (short story collection, 100 - 200 double-spaced pp) - $1,000 cash prize, publication by BOA Editions. Judge is BOA publisher Peter Conners.
One spot remaining: Aug. 8 - 14 in Valencia, CA at CalArts, hosted by Vermont College of Fine Arts, a summer fiction workshop I’m scheduled to teach: “The Long and the Short of It,” open to all writers & part of VCFA’s annual writers conference. Registration form is here & more info on the various workshop offerings is here.
A preview of May’s agent list is accessible here. Bookish yearly subscriptions are 30% off.
Next week’s feature is an interview with Patricia Henley about her new story collection, Apple & Palm. It’s National Short Story Month! Thanks to Bill Wolfe, over at his Substack Read Her Like an Open Book, for including The Virginity of Famous Men in a recent post.
📗
—
Welcome new and returning subscribers ☀️
This week I’m traveling for work and trying to stay above the waterline, and today’s post is a short assortment of literary resources, including and a couple of fascinating conversations I listened to in the last few days:
Brad Listi’s interview with Patrick Radden Keefe for his new book London Falling for Brad’s Otherppl podcast (so interesting that I’m tempted to listen to it again).
Aimee Liu, who publishes the MFA Lore Substack, spoke with novelist and short story writer Karen Shepard earlier this week. (A Bookish interview with Aimee is coming soon.)
Andy Borowitz’s conversation with Heather Cox Richardson for The Borowitz Report was likewise absorbing (and reassuring—history shows us, over and over, what happens to people who think it won’t repeat itself. )
National and international writer and artist residencies:
Book contests:
New (flash) story:
Earlier this week, I published a flash story, “Tax Day,” in Flash Fiction Magazine. I don’t often write stories based on actual events, but this one is an exception (I couldn’t get this poor woman off my mind.)
Two upcoming events:
📘 If you’re in Chicago today, Friday, May 15, at 6:30 PM: join me for a reading featuring some of Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies graduate creative writing program faculty at the Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago. Readers: Naeem Murr, Donna Seaman, Rachel Swearingen, Jim Stewart III, and John McCarthy. I’ll be there to host.
📕 For friends and literary travelers in Los Angeles: on Wednesday, May 27, 7 PM, please join Michael Elias and me at Chevalier’s Books, 133 N. Larchmont, L.A., where we’ll be talking about Michael’s new novel Bender’s L.A. (A favorite line: “He got into his 1954 Alfa Romeo Giulietta, a car of such temperamental nature that when Bender turned the key in the ignition, he had already done something wrong.”)
Along with writing books (incl. You Can Go Home Now, a great 2020 noir novel), Michael is a screenwriter (The Frisco Kid, Young Doctors in Love, and he cowrote The Jerk with Steve Martin and Carl Gottlieb). He’s also acted and written for TV.
"Tax Day": One of the best last sentences *ever*, Christine! Thanks for writing & sharing it!
Tax Day…wow.