Pocketful of bliss

We Bury the Landscape news

This weekend, if you buy my book from Queen's Ferry Press, you will get a free ebook copy. Here are all the fine places where you can purchase my book, but please consider buying it directly from the publisher. I posted all the reviews for We Bury the Landscape here. There’s also a recent review and a giveaway of one copy of the book at Unabridged Chick.

Lake Effect reading

Robert Vaughan did an excellent reading of his story "The Upswing of Falling" and my story "Revenge of the Goldfish" (first published in The Brooklyner and included in my book We Bury the Landscape) for WUWM 89.7 FM - Milwaukee Public Radio's Lake Effect segment hosted by Stephanie Lecci and Robert Vaughan. Carol Wobig also read her work.

More Publication News

• In Mixer, the early version of “The Village of the Mermaids” is published. This piece is collected in We Bury the Landscape.
  
• I have recent acceptances to Punchnel's (which pays a few minutes after acceptance!), ESC, and Painted Bride Quarterly.
• Meg Tuite, fiction editor of Connotation Press and über-talented writer, nominated my mini-tale, "City of the Dead," for the storySouth  2012 Million Writers Award.
• Dave Bonta said some kind words about Night Fish in Via Negativa. In the recent issues of JMWW and Press 1, Gretchen Hodgin and Valerie Fox wrote incredibly well-thought reviews of Night Fish. 
• I also had a fun exchange here with Gretchen Hodgin about my chapbook, Insomnia.
• Rumjhum Biswas interviews me here. The behind-the-scene happenings of that interview involved recipes about curry. :D
• Two of my poems “The Invisible” (published in Unspoken Water) and “The Seventh Stranger” (published in Paper Crow) were listed in Ellen Datlow’s Honorable Mentions for The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4. There were so many writers that were included, and only these venerable 18 made the cut. Kenneth Yu’s story was also listed among the HMs. 

cover of Unspoken Water #1

As a final note, I leave you with a short block of powerful prose. This is an excerpt from Brendan Connell’s The Translation of Father Torturo. This is why the written word will never lose its allure. 

As a child he had been brutal, a kicker of cats, a resolute swatter of flies -- one who delighted in passing gas against lighted candles. As a young man, under the auspices of the church, he had grown hard, educated and inverted. He had studied the lives of the Saints, from those of universal fame down to others, who had as little reknown as pismires. He savoured their histories, their sufferings, lapping them up as a poisoned man would drafts of emetic. He strove to lighten the darkness within him, and for every match he struck, a gust of cold, midnight wind responded, leaving him strolling sightless through bleak, empty space. As a man he was deliberate and blunt, a devotee of the Crucifixion.