An awfully nice thing: Darlin Neal and Scott Garson of Wigleaf have put together a list of their fifty favorite Very Short Fictions from the past year, and saw fit to include a piece of mine, "Flies," which originally appeared in Hobart. This tickles me, not in the bad sense where you can't breathe and then whiz down your own leg, but in the other sense, the good one.

Not that anyone has reason to care, but a thing about this story: it could just as well be called nonfiction. I mean that literally. Nothing in it didn't happen except the fantasy bits labeled truthfully as fantasy, plus also the fictional bits labeled truthfully within the story as fiction. That said, so much of the story is composed of those two elements that, sure, why not: fiction.

Or, no, hold on, how about:

Blobfiction, greenish, and transparent enough that inside it you can see the slowly dissolving hunks of nonfiction it just ate.

Yes, I like that just fine.

In his book The Other Lover, my friend Bruce Smith has a great poem called "Afterbody" where we get, among other things, this:

"...From the most meager

scraps of voice on the telephone--
a half tone or quarter tone--

he pieces the body together: widow's peak, collarbones,
pelvic tilt, lobes and clefts, the body cloned

from some pressures and inflections,
a stammered word, interference, aspiration."

And I say thee yea, Bruce Smith! Yeah, yea. By our diction shall we be known, shall make ourselves known, shall manifest our very lives aloud, and those of our characters, and thank you for saying so so clearly.

Boy. We are in the suckiest stretch, death-wise.

WAB! Not the sound a superhero's fist makes when she punches a jellyfish, but Writers and Books in Rochester, New York. I read there last night--good reading, good crowd, great acoustics, fun intro by Steve Huff, great lead-off by the delightful Sarah Freligh. But beyond the reading itself, I think WAB is an important place: the y in an important equation.

You know how every ten or fifteen minutes we hear about another landmark independent bookstore closing? And how also the chains are mostly in the shitter too? And how in six weeks, the Kindle is going to be as ubiquitous as the Ipod? How this coming September it will be as necessary a part of the going-to-college kit as a laptop and a 72-pack of strawberry flavored condoms? And once we're buying almost everything on line (like we do now, but more so) what chance will an actual book-selling-type-building have?

(Full disclosure: it's not that I think the Kindle will be bad for books, or writers, or readers--I think it will end up being, on balance, quite good for all those things and people. But it's really going to suck for bookstores. And I do worry a little about what happens when Amazon is the only place on earth to buy any text of any kind in any language, but hey, that's still years away. At least a year. Probably at least a year!)

(And another disclosure: these thoughts were not developed in isolation, but in conversation, mainly with the good John Warner. So if any of them are crap, blame him.)

Well.

Maybe bookstores are going to survive to the extent that they become other things too. Lots already are, of course. Most, even. But maybe they will all need to be other things--a community space, a place of union, whether that means gallery and/or stage and/or mixing board and/or cafe and/or dunk tank. And then also sell books. (Which is why WAB is the y, not the x and the y: they don't actually sell books there, except ones related to visiting writers, writing classes, reading projects and the like.)

And even then the books sold will have to be the kind that bring something to the table beyond content--but I'm still thinking about that.

So on Saturday we sledded all morning, and Chloe creamed this one kid, took him out at the knees, just really messed him up, which is kind of what you have to expect if you insist on standing at the bottom of a sledding hill looking the wrong direction, but on the other hand, he was the only other kid on the entire hill at the time, and she wasn’t trying to hit him, so what were the odds?

Then we had lunch, and after that it was still snowing so we drove into town and went to a museum that is great in so many ways. And Chloe and Tom and I talked about what ceramic armor might be all about, or cardboard boxes made of slip cast low-fire white clay. (Okay seriously, did you click on that last link? Did you? I'm not fucking kidding, go click on that link, and look at the cardboard box and those dusty crushed paper cups and know that in that artwork there is no cardboard and no dust and no paper, et cetera.)

And after that we went down into the Kid Area, where they have dress-up clothes, and the kind of building block court you’d have in your house if you were six and had a million dollars to buy blocks with, and the clay workshop where I sculpted The Prince of the Uglies and Chloe sculpted the King of the Nosiest People and Tom sculpted the The Big Blue Bird.

Saturdays might get better than that but I kind of doubt it.

Then on Sunday we went to the other kind of museum, the kind that's actually a bowling alley.

Awesome.

The cycle seems predictable: the reviews come, if we're lucky, in the month or two after the book is released, and tail off fairly quickly thereafter, with maybe a few here and there in the subsequent six months. And that's pretty much your load, shot. But every so often, months and months later, a really nice review comes out to give the book one more good goosing. This time it was John Domini giving All Over all kinds of good juju in the latest issue of American Book Review.

I've been submitting stories to this contest on and off for the past decade, and to its sponsor, The Missouri Review, for even longer than that.

No dice.

Until this year.

!

A friend recently wrote to congratulate me. I asked, What for? For the Pushcart thing, she said. What Pushcart thing? I said. The honorable mention, she said.

It was news to me.

Happy news!

And soon confirmed, also happily: a story called "Falling Through," originally published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review, had gotten an Honorable Mention in the latest volume, XXXIII.

But I did wonder why the 'Cart hadn't gotten in touch directly.

The answer was obvious enough: that many more email addresses to track down, et cetera.

But still: it is a happiness-provoking thing, hearing that a story has been honored in some way, and happiness is rare enough already. Why wouldn't an editor--or anyone else--take the opportunity to cause a little more?

But then I thought, Okay, Kesey, back to work.

But then I thought...

And I went to check.

Amazon, search function.

And sure enough:

"Wait," first published in Volume 28, Issue 4 of the splendid Kenyon Review, received an Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: 20th Annual Collection.

And "Asuncion," first published in McSweeney's Issue 15, had been HM'd the previous year, in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2006.

And I thought again:

Why didn't they let me know?

Were they afraid I was already too happy?

That the slightest bit more happiness would push me over the edge?

Or were they just too busy?

Other writers have since confirmed to me, in regard to many other anthologies, that such non-notification as regards Honorable Mention status is the norm.

And so to all you anthologizers I say:

We know how hard you work, and for such little recompense in the idiom of mammon.

We know!

And we thank you for it.

We do!

But also:

No one is ever too happy.

will be in Chicago for the upcoming AWP conference, by all means track me down.