Some things to report, plus calls for submissions…

//

The latest issue of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose & Thought is out, with art by Xiaoze Xie; poems by Hadara Bar-Nadav, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Dorothy Chan, Alain Ginsberg, Nazifa Islam, Moira J., or Gaagé Dat’éhe, and more;  nonfiction by Anne Yoder, Kristin McCandless, and Justin Lawrence Daugherty and Jill Talbot; AND . . . fiction (<–my section!!) by Lily Hoang, Jennifer Morales, and Cecca Austin Ochoa. Lily’s “The Mystical Adventures of the Happy Cat” is a delightful and eerie fable starring one Happy Cat; Jennifer’s excerpt from Junction/Flame on the Mesa is a sneak peek at her current novel, which houses a lesbian pulp novel within it; Cecca’s “Transient” gives a glimmer of queer utopia to a homeless youth at a farm called Fog Orchard.

Submissions are now open for our next issue. We read twice a year; deadlines are March 1 and September 1. Consider submitting your work!

***

(art by Kristen Stone)

I’ve rebooted Name Tags, a column series on issues related to names and naming, over at Entropy, and am looking for contributors. Here’s the Call for Submissions. This CFS may be familiar: it’s a new iteration of a column I edited for the Land Line Quarterly from 2011-3.

***

Speaking of names, I’ve dropped the Henry from my nominal identity — it just wasn’t sticking. I’m currently publishing under the names M. and Megan until further notice.

***

I’ve been writing for a new arts criticism site, 4Columns. My most recent review, of Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s essential Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977-1997, was recently posted in full on Dennis Cooper’s blog. Alright!

Speaking of New Narrative, I’ll be at the upcoming Communal Presence conference at Berkeley in October, appearing on a panel called Bad Boundaries 2: Ethics in New Narrative Writing Then & Now, with Sam Cohen, Maxe Crandall, Nikki Darling, and Tim Jones-Yelvington. Sam and I will be presenting work related to our collaborative chapbook project in progress, Bad Boundaries (which collects a story by each of us as well as a conversation about breakups/conflict, writing the ex, and accountability and the duty of repair).

***

Thanks to a tip from Sam, this spring I took a psychomagic writing class with the genius Laurie Weeks, author of the great Zipper Mouth (Feminist Press), whose short story “Swallow” is included in the above Writers Who Love Too Much. I read “Swallow” in 2005 thanks to one Andrea Lawlor gifting me a copy of its original publication in a 4×4 tiny journal; it CHANGED me. So it was exhilarating to work with her for a few months as part of a queer feminist art cabal in South Williamsburg. We even had our own tincture (thanks, Grace!). I wish I had taken some photos; it was a dreamy and powerful collection of wild weirdos, a lifeboat during nervous times.

***

I’ve also been contributing a bit to the New York Trans Oral History Project. My conversations with musician Eli Oberman and artist/writer J. Soto are now available in the archive, alongside many other treasures. I believe the project is still looking for more volunteers.