I have two flash fictions up at HAD today: “Cinderella at the Podiatrist” and “Rapunzel Gets Referred to the Endocrinologist.”

These stories are part of a series that I drafted during one of child’s many episodes of croup last winter. They made me laugh and made other people ask me if I was okay, so I decided to send them out into the wider world.

This was my first time submitting to a HAD submission call, the highlight of which was following their twitter in the hours/days to follow, getting updates on how many submissions remained, feeling like the quiet kid still standing in a game of dodgeball, wondering if I was good or just too short to have been hit yet.

Thanks to HAD for my first skull and to my friends who read these when they were handwritten on folded paper.

Previously, “Cinderella at the Podiatrist” was shortlisted for The Masters Review Spring Small Fiction Awards judged by K-Ming Chang.

My short story “The Year She Lived on the Bus” (published in JMWW in 2017) has been anthologized in the new JMWW 2013-2022 Anthology out from Modern Times Press. You can buy a copy in paperback or e-book form here.

I’ve been involved with JMWW in various capacities (most recently as the fiction editor-of-the-month) for many years, but it still surprised me to read through the table of contents for this new anthology and see so many familiar names of amazing writers. I’m so proud to be part of this lineup, the best of a decade of JMWW.

“Founded in 2002, jmww is a weekly online journal of writing—publishing the best in poetry, fiction, flash fiction, essays, and interviews. Stories published in the journal have appeared in Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50, BIFFY, Best of the Net, and the VERA. The journal has also released six print anthologies and three hand-assembled poetry chapbook contest winners. This anthology picks up where the last one left off—with works from 2013 and onward picked and voted on by present and former jmww editors.”

Selected 2022 Reading – I’ve put ** next to my absolute favorites

Fiction/Novels/Novellas

• Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades 
• The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold 
• Dead Man in a Ditch by Luke Arnold
• One Foot in the Fade by Luke Arnold
• Persuasion by Jane Austen 
• Hunger by Elise Blackwell**
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
• Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close** 
• The Smart One by Jennifer Close
• The New Wilderness by Diane Cook**
• The Lover by Marguerite Duras 
• The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
• The Upstairs House by Julia Fine**  
• Desperate Characters by Paula Fox**
• Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh 
• Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
• Tinkers by Paul Harding**
• Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
• Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
• The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones**
• Post Traumatic by Chantal V Johnson**
• Intimacies by Katie Kitamura **
• Submergence by J.M. Ledgard**
• Be Brief and Tell Them Everything by Brad Listi 
• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood**
• Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
• Turn of the Screw by Henry James
• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel 
• Radio Free Vermont by Bill McKibben
• Sylvia by Leonard Michaels**
• The Men by Sandra Newman
• A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik**
• The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
• His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
• The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
• Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi**
• Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters**
• I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart**
• The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade**
• Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
• The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt**
• The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
• All Systems Red by Martha Wells**
• Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
• Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
• Exist Strategy by Martha Wells 
• Network Effect by Martha Wells 
• Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
• Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton**
• White Horse by Erika Wurth

Short Story Collections

• The Predatory Animal Ball by Jen Fliss
• Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty**  

Nonfiction/Essays

• The Book of Atlantis Black by Betsy Bonner
• The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras**
• A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
• How To Not Always Be Working by Marlee Grace 
• Body Work by Melissa Febos**
• What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché**  
• The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser**
• The Unwritten Book by Sam Hunt**
• Bastards by Mary Anna King** 
• Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse** 
• The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie** 
• Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science by Siddhartha Mukherjee 
• And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O’Connell 
• Three Women by Lisa Taddeo**

Poetry

• What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer**
• I Hope This Finds You Well by Kate Baer
• And Yet by Kate Baer
• The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché  
• The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon**
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke
• Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets
• What to Miss When by Leigh Stein

Zines/Chapbooks/Graphic Novels

• An Ecotone Almanac
• In the Fifth World: Portrait of the Navajo Nation by Adriel Heisey and Kenji Kawano 
• Community Chest by Natalie Serber
• James McNeill Whistler by Robin Spencer
• Georgia O’Keeffe A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz  

I keep annual reading lists as a record for myself and I post them in invitation for fellow readers to talk about books both read and overlooked. Feel free to contact me.

I’ve put ** next to my absolute favorite reads of the year.

Selected 2021 Reading (by genre, then alphabetical by author/editor last name)

Fiction/Novels/Novellas

• Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo **
• A Separation by Katie Kitamura
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan
• Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino**
• A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett**
• Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
• Lakewood by Megan Giddings
• The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier**
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy**
• Eat Only When You’re Hungry by Lindsay Hunter
• The Pisces by Melissa Broder
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
• On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu**
• The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai**
• Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
• Red Clocks by Leni Zumas**
• Inferno by Eileen Myles
• Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney**
• Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder**
• Normal People by Sally Rooney

Nonfiction/Essays

• Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses**
• Girlhood by Melissa Febos
• Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains by Kerri Arsenault**
• Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco**
• In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius by Arika Okrent**
• Essays One Lydia Davis
• White Magic by Elissa Washuta
• The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life by Kyle Beachy
• We Were The Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter
• Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro
• Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho
• Real Estate by Deborah Levy
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
• Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation by David Correia, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Nick Estes, Melanie K. Yazzie
• Sacred Instructions by Sherri Mitchell

Short Story Collections

• The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans**
• The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw**
• Give My Love to the Savages: Stories by Chris Stuck**

Poetry

• A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver
• Whereas by Layli Long Soldier**
• The Slow Art by Sierra Golden**
• How to Carry Water: Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton
• The Renunciations: Poems by Donika Kelly
• Licorice by Liz Bruno

Zines/Chapbooks/Graphic Novels

• Seek You by Kristen Radtke
• Love Life by Patty Gone
• No Self-respecting Woman by Katherine Morgan