I can, at last, brag about my new position at Goliad Review and Press. Since last November, I have been working with some friends from South Texas to bring a new literary journal and press to life. Have a look at this page, and you’ll see my name on the masthead as Production Manager. https://www.goliadreview.com/contact/
It’s a pleasure to work with this bunch of very smart men, and so many talented authors.
I have proof at last. Three of my stories appear in this one issue of Helix Magazine. I’d give you a link to their pages so you could buy a copy, but I have yet to find that. So, if you would like to read any of these stories, let me know and I will send you a copy.
I am honored to have been invited to speak in the beautiful Ecuadorian city of Cuenca at the Cuenca International Writers Conference May 28-June 1, 2018.
http://cuencawritersconference.com/conference-schedule-2/
I wrote this review for JASAT, the Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas. It appears in Volume 46: November, 2016.
While still feeling smug about the Faulkner-Wisdom folks saying they liked my novel-in-progress, I logged into Submittable to see what I still have in the active column, with a view to submitting something somewhere. I clicked the “Accepted” tab by accident, knowing I have received no notifications, but three of my story titles were there with a bright green “accepted” tag beside them. Apparently, The Helix Literature and Art Magazine emailed me two weeks ago, but I never received the emails. I could have been happy about this all this time! For whatever reason, I suppose the time wasn’t right yet.
Look for these stories in the Fall 2017 issue:
I was pleased to learn today that my novel-in-progress, Finding Cabo Rojo, received some recognition from the judges of the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom competition. It made it to the semi-finals, and I heard through the grapevine they had more submissions this year than they have ever had before. I’ll consider it a win. I’m thrilled!
This year I signed up for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge. I think it is the same challenge I wrote for last year but the name changed. In any case, this weekend is round two, so I plan to be writing. I really like my round one story, and it scored respectably, so hopefully it will see the light of day before too long.
I neglected to share this article about me when it came out a year ago. I am still at Texas Review Press now.
I won a flash fiction prize in the Cracked Flash Fiction Competition in December 2016. My piece was entitled “The Understanding.” You can read it HERE, or you can just scroll down the page. I decided to post a screenshot as this news is a couple of years old now, and you just never know when some website will go down or they’ll decide not to keep your piece live. Many thanks once again to the judges at Cracked Flash Fiction. This is flash fiction after all, so it’s short enough to fit a single screen. Here it is:
I went back and took a screenshot of the prompt for this story:
I particularly loved the judge’s comments at the beginning of this:
I want to take a moment to appreciate the finesse that little details about the characters are dropped to build an image of them in the mind. Without ever saying outright that Mrs. Baker is a construction worker, we see that she’s wearing a flannel shirt and a hardhat (and, presuming this is mostly from her POV, ‘an outboard motor’ sounds like something a construction worker would be able to recognize (I certainly wouldn’t be able to)). There might have been a little more build-up to the climax, or the climax a little bigger–it felt like the story started at a mezzo-piano and only grew to a mezzo-forte or forte (sorry to bust out the music terminology out). I really like how much this piece of flash relies on extrapolating data–I had to reread it a couple of times to get all of the nuances. Good job with this!
—Mariah Burkett
A few other stories I’ve written that may interest you include: “Do You Know the Bunny Hop?,” “Strings of Solace,” and “The Meek Inherit.”
I’m pleased that my 2nd round story for the NYC Short Story Challenge 2016, “The Art of the Bargain,” received an honorable mention. Only four stories advanced to round three from each heat, and I was number 5. I’m still proud to have made it that far. I’ll certainly participate in this contest again. It was a lot of fun, and I’ve come away feeling good about my writing. I’ll share the story eventually. . . For now I want to implement some of the excellent suggestions the judges made to improve it.