I have dedicated this year to writing and illustrating childrens' books (you can read more about that here A Year of Children's Books), but that doesn't mean the other work I've done has disappeared or that I will never work on things like  The Red Book or Battle Rattle and Waiting for the Enemy again. I spent too much time thinking about the ideas in those books to just let them go entirely, and I have a couple novels sitting around that I will revisit when I can focus at a more brain-awake time of day than 4 a.m. But they're on hold for now as I work the things most important to me: being a husband and father.

Back in 2012 I had a group of essays published by The Literary Review. They were short pieces I had written when I was experimenting with "flash" form out of necessity. I wanted to get into an idea, and then get out of it so that I could get on to the next idea, and I wanted to make the work short enough that an editor would be more likely to read the whole thing (believe it or not, when you submit things to magazines, the longer they are, the less likely they are to be read...can you believe that an editor might not read your whole story? How could they possibly decide on if they should or should not publish it if they haven't read the end? Honestly you are lucky if they read the whole first page most places: the more you know). I've never enjoyed reading flash nonfiction (or any flash form really), but you don't have to enjoy reading or writing a form in order to write it. So if anyone is being told that, don't believe it's true. Anyway, some people do enjoy flash literature, and I am lucky for that.

This year The Literary Review published a new issue that was a compilation of work spanning from 1957-2017. It features work by Mao Tse-Tung, Joyce carol Oates, Vaclav Havel, Okogbule Wonodi, Terese Svoboda and some guy no one has ever heard of...me. The folks at TLR included me and my little essay about the day I learned I would be stuck in Saudi Arabia indefinitely for the invasion of Iraq in a book with work by writers whom I never imagined my name would share page space with. 

Here I am holding one of my contributor's copies. You can see my daughter's monitor in the background because it is basically always with me unless she is awake, and then she is with me. That is how I roll.

Not only did they reprint this essay in the current issue, but a man who I choose to call a friend despite us never actually meeting in person, Frank Fucile, interviewed me, and then The Literary Review published that interview.

I'll make a separate post about the interview when I get more time, but for now I wanted to at least post the links to the interview, and to The Literary Review so that anyone who is interested in getting a copy to read can do so. The interview is free (it's online), but you'll have to buy the current issue of The Literary Review if you want to read it: which makes sense because it is made by people who must eat to survive. I suppose that is a subject for a different time, but if you keep consuming things for free and complain when the people who give you those things for free make you watch advertisements or figure out a way to mine your data so that they can eat, you may have forgotten that nothing is free. 

Read the interview with Frank Fucile and I by clicking the button below:

Get a copy of the most current issue of TLR by clicking the button below: