Longlisted, or the Limbo of Writing

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I’ve recently had two works longlisted for prizes. This is immensely gratifying yet also unnerving.

Publishing contests are akin to swim meets. Each heat eliminates some competitors and advances others. The longlist is like the quarterfinals. The next heat is the shortlist – the semifinals. Then the finalists are chosen and a winner declared.

For those like me, who tend toward the extremes of black and white, being named to a longlist is both joyous and stressful.

It’s amazing to have my work recognized but it hasn’t won or been rejected. It’s that tension that I have a hard time living with.

It reminds me of when my youngest child was little. He couldn’t bear for me to rip a Band-aid off but didn’t like it pulled off slowly either (who does?!).

If I’d let him, he’d wear that Band-aid for weeks and years until it finally lost all of its stick and fall off by itself.

Usually I told him I’d count to three but rip it off at two. Sure, maybe he has trust issues now, but at least we moved on with our lives.

It’s that in-between time – between the yes and the no of accepting my work – that’s difficult for me to bear. I’m definitely a rip-the-Band-aid-off person – let me be sad for a while and then move on.

Excited for AWP24, Thanks to GCAC

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The 2021 AWP conference was scheduled to be held in Kansas City. Of course, that was prime pandemic time, so instead, the conference was held online.

After a disappointing time in Philadelphia in 2022 (other than this little piece that I wrote after nearly being run over), I wasn’t sure I was going to attend the 2023 conference. But I had a roundtrip airfare credit (thanks, pandemic) so off I went to Seattle – and had a good time.

Now three years later, we’re finally heading to KC in early February! And I’m able to attend thanks to a grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.

I’m excited to see friends, meet new people and journals/presses, visit with the publisher of my first book and, of course, take in the great speakers and sessions.

While I wish #AWP24 was in a warmer state (or month), I’m excited to see what Kansas City has to offer to 10,000+ writers and book lovers .

Structure Sets Me Free

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Does it have pockets?

For many women, that’s our first question about an article of clothing. And if it does – and especially if it’s a dress – when you wear it, and someone compliments the dress, you put your hands in the pockets and swirl around a little saying, “It has pockets!”

DIHP’s awesome logo

It’s also the name of delightful online literary magazine. And they just published my story-as-a-recipe called “Stuffed Peppers to Please Everyone,” which you can read here.

This story started in a “hermit crab” workshop almost two years ago by the wonderful Cheryl Pappas.

Hermit crab fiction is a story that takes on the existing form of another type of writing, for instance washing machine instructions, a shopping list, a math word problem – the possibilities are endless.

And you could read a hundred stories-as-recipes and, despite having the same structure, they’d be a hundred completely different stories.

My story “Family Vacation Dictionary” is kind of hermit crab-y, in the form of dictionary entries. But you wouldn’t really notice the structure without the word “dictionary” in the title.

That’s the beauty of hermit crab I think. It’s still a story – just in a different structure.

You might think writing in a specific structure is limiting, but to paraphrase, structure will set you free.

For this workshop prompt, I chose a dish that I make often without a recipe. Once I wrote out the ingredients, I just began noticing the different colors and textures of the food and what they reminded me of.

Writing this story as a recipe was less torturous than my usual process because I had a format to follow – once the list of ingredients was done, I knew the instructions were next, etc.

The structure freed me up to concentrate on the words and imagery. Not to say that the road to publishing was any easier. I first sent it out in January 2022 and it was published October 2023, not unusual for my stories.

Not that many literary magazines take hermit crab fiction – it’s different. But I’m so glad there are the brave ones out there that do!

So Much Paper (Writing Retreat Edition)

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Due to the severe flooding in Montpelier and the surrounding areas, this year’s Clockhouse Writers’ Conference was moved online. Goddard College’s campus is fine as it’s on a hill, but so much of Vermont is devastated.

We’re sad not to be together on campus, but more heartbroken for the lives and livelihoods that have been impacted.

Now I am holed up in a hotel not far from my house, but far enough away from life, work and family duties that (understandably) distract me from my writing life.

I haven’t been writing much new stuff lately, as I’ve been concentrating on sending out my second story collection to publishers.

So I thought I’d take this week to get my writing organized. Not very sexy but it has yielded some great stuff.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Gustave Flaubert

I’m very good about taking notes in journals at conferences and workshops, or scribbling story ideas, or writing down snippets of conversations.

What I’m not so good at is going back and doing something with what’s in the journals. So I brought 10 journals from my bookshelves at home and have been going through them.

It sounds boring but it’s been quite fruitful, especially the tidbits I’ve re-discovered. I’ve typed them all into a separate document so if I ever need inspiration or a ‘tidbit’ for a story, I can look there.

I got this idea from Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer. How he uses such tidbits to write lyrics is fascinating.

Inside my tidbits, I found a phrase that fit perfectly into a poem I’d written a while ago. That one phrase pulled everything together.

I’m excited to see what else I’ll uncover.

Inspiration + Time = Story

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I had two stories published since the new year, first “Family Vacation Dictionary,” in the tiny journal and, more recently, “Last Bus to Stonehenge” in Bridge Eight.

They are so different, but like my children, I love them equally.

“Family Vacation Dictionary” was born in a workshop in the summer of 2020. The prompts were based on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, “a dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express.”

As the exercise was to make up words and their definitions, I didn’t view the entries as a whole. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I saw a story threaded through them. I’m grateful that the tiny journal appreciated the unusual format of this tiny story and published it.

“Last Bus to Stonehenge” is a more traditional short story. I had visited Stonehenge in 2019 and, predictably, had multiple epiphanies and story ideas. But I didn’t want to write about Stonehenge straight on – that’s boring.

For more than two years, all I had was the title (we had taken the last bus of the day to the site). But in the last few months, I thought about two things that I wanted to write about but hadn’t found the right story for them.

I alighted on the idea of a play within a play, something I’ve never done, which pulled the two things and the title together. And now, it’s out in the world.

It’s a great bonus that the Bridge Eight editors chose a photo of San Francisco, where the story is set, rather than a picture of the site, which would be too predictable.

As I continue my search for a publisher of my second collection (these are two of the 22 stories and flash pieces in it), I’m turning my thoughts to novellas. So it’s now time to start mulling those over.

That’s great! What’s next?

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The world of publishing is absolutely binary. Your work is either accepted or it’s not.

“Yes, we loved your story,” or “No, maybe try somewhere else.”

For me, these often come in quick succession. Usually a “Yes” is followed quickly by a “No.” Or maybe three “No” emails in a row. Just the universe’s way of keeping me humble, I guess.

  • Nov. 18, story acceptance. Yay!
  • Nov. 19, poem rejection. Boo.
  • Nov. 29, “We’ve nominated The Other Side of Luck for a Pushcart Prize.” Holy moly! Wow! Amazing! (You can order a copy here.)
  • Nov. 29, story rejection. Yeah, that tracks.


So while I’ve now been published in more than 40 literary magazines since 2000, I’ve been rejected more than 350 times since then as well.

It’s always so amazing that an editor likes a story of mine enough to publish it. And I ride that high for days or even months. It definitely makes the rejections bounce off easier.

Writing is difficult enough. Getting it out there? Brutal.

As I often tell my husband, life would be less painful if I could just stop writing, but it would also be less joyful.

Despite everything, a good writing year

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As bleak as the weather and the world are, I can’t help but write.

Happy stories, sad stories, it doesn’t matter. They still come to me. I still write them down. I still submit them to journals.

A few are published. Most of them are rejected many, many times. And it always hurts.

If I could not write, I definitely wouldn’t. Why do I invite the rejection, the heartbreak on to myself?

For those few moments of euphoria when I feel I’ve expressed myself clearly?

That somehow I’ve found the English words to convey the jumble of feelings that flare and recede inside me?

I’ll never understand why I write and I’ve long given up trying to. I just keep writing.

And when what I’m trying to express has found a kindred spirit who wants to publish my words, I rejoice.

This year I had eight stories or flash fiction accepted and/or published. Three were reprints of pieces previously published in print-only journals or long-shuttered online pubs.

It’s so exciting to have old work rediscovered, like the quirky little story, “Spin Cycle,” recently re-published by Bulb Culture Collective.

Even more thrilling was an unexpected end-of-the-year announcement that Red Rock Review nominated my story, “The Other Side of Luck,” for a 2022 Pushcart Prize (more on this in another post).

My story, “Earthquake Weather,” was nominated in 2011, so it’s lovely to think that maybe that honor wasn’t just a fluke.

What’s Old is New Again

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There is niche of literary journals that reprint published works that are no long (or never were) available online. As a writer whose first published pieces were print-only, this has been a wonderful way to give new life to older pieces.

This year, I’ve had four pieces accepted as reprints. The first, American Gothic Getaway, was published by Doubleback Review in April, and the other three are due before the end of the year.

While I am also sending out new stories, like The Jumping-Off Point recently published in the Santa Fe Literary Review, it’s gratifying to have “old” stories accepted again. It helps validate that the first acceptance wasn’t a fluke and that the piece has staying power.

Two stories, Spin Cycle and The Divorced Man’s Guide to the First Year, we both originally published in 2011 and included in my 2012 collection of stories, Welcome, Anybody.

It’s thrilling to me that ten years later, these stories are still relevant to fiction editors and will be read by a whole new audience.

AWP 22 Learnings

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As always, the annual AWP Conference was fun, interesting, and completely overwhelming and exhausting. This year, we (13,000 of us) were together in person in Philadelphia. And a grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council helped me get there by paying the registration fee.

AWP book and magazine haul
My #AWP22 haul

I’ve been a lot more active on Twitter in the last year and one of the fun things in Philly was meeting members of Writing Twitter in person.

Of course, it was awkward at times, but told myself that they were more scared of me than I was of them.

I learned many things during AWP, during sessions, the bookfair, offsite readings, and walking around the City.

Here are my top three:

Spec writing is not for me

This was more of a reinforcement than a new idea. I’ve written before about how inspiration comes to me. And after talking about flash and shorter stories throughout the conference, I just can’t sit down and think, I should write a story between 100 and 500 words.

I might skip AWP 23

Currently, I’m finishing my second collection of stories but it’s not done. So I didn’t have anything “new” to talk about. The publisher of my first collection doesn’t attend AWP anymore so I didn’t feel like I had a home base. Combine that with the feeling that everyone there had accomplished so much more than me, and I fly home quite deflated and discouraged for my writing.

Being in person was lovely

The Editor in Chief of The Bookends Review, for which I am a Fiction Editor, lives in Philly. So I had the great pleasure to meet up with him and our Poetry Editor. We got to know each other better in one hour than we did the last two years over email and messages.

BUT, while AWP required vaccination and masks at sponsored events and the Bookfair, I still didn’t feel safe. And sure enough, a day or two later after the conference ended, Writer Twitter was full of people reporting they tested postive for Covid.

The good news is that, three weeks later, I am re-inflated and back to writing.

A Good Fall for Writing but Doubt Remains

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As we head into year three of the pandemic, I try to count my blessings, literally, every day. I won’t name them for fear of the jinx (I am boringly predictable in this) but I am very grateful for recent publications and acceptances.

I had two poems published this fall: Sledgehammer Lit published Her Boyfriend with the Difficult Name, which I also had the nervewracking pleasure of reading aloud during the online Full House Literary Festival. In October, Poetry Super Highway republished my Halloween-inspired poem The Stocks.

All the voices in my head. “Christ in Limbo” by Hieronymus Bosch. 

For the past ten years, I’ve been writing short stories for my second collection, which I sent to a handful of publishers over the summer (fingers crossed). The title story of that collection, Current Disasters, was published in October Hills Magazine in, well, October.

One of my favorite stories, The Jumping-Off Point, was accepted by Santa Fe Magazine for publication in 2022. Both this story (TJOP) and Current Disasters were written and rewritten over several years. I kept trying to abandon them, but there was something in each of them that I couldn’t step away from.

In Current Disasters, it was the idea/challenge of ‘can we really change who we are/how we act?’ In TJOP, it was the push and pull of locations – what makes us stay/what makes us go?

So I wrote on, and stopped, and started again, and finally…literally years later….they were right.

Even though I am blessed and grateful to be published, it’s difficult not to continually doubt myself and my writing.

I could write dozens of essays about my self-doubt but, at least about my writing, they would all end with “and yet I kept writing.”