Being Weird

Flea market lamp; thrift store wine glass bought for our wedding; College Cars Only sign stolen from Earlham College in the mid-1980s; tablecloth brought from Africa via college friend; ship painting by folk artist Mary Paulsen acquired in 2012 in North Carolina; glass flowerpot candleholder from Mendelson’s Liquidators and used for wedding centerpiece, still useful; Writer in the midst of detritus of the Weird.

I am thrilled to announce that my story, “Rabbit, Cat, Girl” was chosen for the Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3, forthcoming from Undertow Publications. Originally published in XIII: Stories of Transformation, this is a story that I blogged about here. (For the full table of contents of YBWF Vol. 3, go here.)

I’m grateful to editor Mark Teppo of Resurrection House for first publishing the story, and to Year’s Best Weird Fiction 3 guest editor Simon Strantzas and Michael Kelly at Undertow.

It’s a big deal (to me) that 1) Anyone is reading anything these days, that 2) Mark Teppo liked my story enough to publish it, and that 3) Simon and Michael also liked it enough to honor it in this way.

I don’t often write short stories. This story came from months and strata of excavation, which I wrote about here and elsewhere on the blog: layers of messy personal essay drafting, onion-peeling story attempts…all trying to find where the innards of that slice of my humanity would fit into Story.

Grateful that it fit somewhere, and that people in the world outside my head appreciate it. I always felt, and still feel, weird. Nice to have an upper case confirmation.