Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ll be doing a solo reading in the May Gallery at the Maryville University Library at 3 p.m. on March 24th, followed by a Q&A hosted by my colleague Johannes Wich-Schwarz.

Obligatory author photo.

My students wanted to hear me read, so it should be a fun crowd. I will be reading a story or stories from my geez-please-finish-me manuscript, which now answers to Horse Show.

This is the second reading in Maryville University’s brand new Writes of Spring series, which is presented by Maryville English, sponsored by the Medart Lectures, and organized by yours truly.

Our third and final reading in this year’s Writes of Spring series will be held on April 14 at 3 PM in LJ’s, Maryville University’s dry pub. It will feature the prose stylings of Luke Rolfes and his debut short fiction collection, Flyover Country.

“Based On A True Story” has finally found a home at StoryQuarterly, where it was just named second runner-up for the StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize, judged by Mat Johnson.

I will receive $50 American, publication in the next issue (which comes out early in 2016), and the deep abiding knowledge that I wasn’t completely cuckoo to write a short story based on John Travolta’s role in The Boy In The Plastic Bubble, which was an ABC Friday Night Movie in 1976.

“Founded in 1975, StoryQuarterly has been publishing emerging and established writers for over 30 years. Among the acclaimed writers who have written for the journal are Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle, Lydia Davis, Mark Doty, Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth McCracken and Joyce Carol Oates.”

The official announcement about the prize winners can be found here.

My (still!) unpublished short story, “Based On A True Story,” earned an honorable mention in The Cincinnati Review‘s annual contest, the Robert and Adele Schiff Prize in Poetry and Prose.

The prize proper was won by a fellow University of Missouri Ph.D. alum, the hilarious Robert Long Foreman, and I’m in good company in the honorable mentions section with another grad school friend, the inimitable LaTanya McQueen.

Here’s a list of all the finalists and honorable mentions.

Animal: A Beast Of A Literary Magazine has been kind enough to nominate “Of Course, Of Course,” the short story about Mr. Ed that I placed with them earlier this year, for Sundress Publications‘ Best Of The Net 2015 competition and online anthology.

The mission of the annual Best Of The Net competition is “to promote the diverse and growing collection of voices who are publishing their work online, a venue that continues to see less respect from such yearly anthologies as the Pushcart and Best American series. This anthology serves to bring greater respect to an innovative and continually expanding medium in the same medium in which it is published.”

It’s a huge surprise and thrill to be nominated!

Read “Of Course, Of Course” here, and keep your fingers crossed…

For the second time, one of my stories has been named a finalist for the annual fiction prize at Salamander: A Magazine for Fiction, Poetry, and Memoirs.

The judge for this contest was Andre Dubus III, who in addition to being the author of six books, has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, and a 2012 Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

“Based On A True Story” is as yet unpublished. I was last a finalist for this contest in 2011 for “The Mammoth Horse Waits.”

The Cossack Review, which published my story “Lady, The Mind-Reading Mare” earlier this year, was kind enough to interview me for their blog, The Volga.

Read the interview, as well as an excerpt from the story, by clicking here.

“Shooting A Mule,” my story about a military experiment involving instantaneous photography and a mule, originally appeared in Redivider. It’s now going to be anthologized in Ashland Creek Press‘s second edition of Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction.

The first edition of this anthology, published in 2014 and shown above, was praised by Animal Studies Journal as “rewarding reading–alternately moving, intriguing, inspiring and harrowing.”

“Lady, The Mind-Reading Mare,” my exploration of the paranormal happenings in a backyard barn circa 1927, has been published in Issue #4 of The Cossack Review.

Here’s a link to the beginning of the story, with additional links at the bottom to buy a .pdf or hard copy of the issue.

“Lady, The Mind-Reading Mare,” my short story about the Virginia horse who was verified psychic by the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in the 1920s, has been accepted by The Cossack Review!

Lady and her typewriter/xylophone!

As the winner of the 2014 Midwest Short Fiction Award at The Laurel Review, I’ll be heading up to Maryville, MO to give a reading of “Fred W. Loring and His Mule, ‘Evil Merodach,’ 48 Hours Before Death” at Northwest Missouri State University on March 19th at 7 p.m.