Yes, I will count both fiction and review as two even though in the same publication.

Issue 34:1 of CALYX Journal has gone to press and my story “The Promised Hour” is featured on the announcement page where you can read it. In the same issue is my review of the marvelous and award-winning short story collection by Wendy Wimmer. I was most fortunate to be sent a review copy of Entry Level: Stories. Those stories have stayed with me, digging around in my subconscious and sending me off on wild flights of discovery. Just to mention one story: A wry entity sends dreams to sleepers. After an unpleasant dream the dreamer tries to lock dreams out by using sleeping pills. Oh, dear, that’s not going to go well.

Shall I consider these two publications due out next month recompense for being cussed out this morning? Yes, yes, I shall. Plus a reminder of my podcast introduction to All the Daughters Sing. That novel is making the rounds. Two full MS requests so far.

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About “The Promised Hour.” Read the story first, please.

An early draft of “The Promised Hour” was my sample fiction in my application to Pacific University’s MFA program. It was also the first story I workshopped in June 2005 and no one liked it. Maybe Debra Magpie Earling (who has a new and beautifully overwhelming The Lost Journals of Sacajewea). But she didn’t return after that first term. Debra said something encouraging—I think she did—but I remember the bad stuff more clearly. (That’s so wrong.) The other students and Pete tore it up. Seriously. Later, I chose a woman I knew to provide me with decompression after the workshopping of my story, and her feedback was worse! Fortunately, I’d had a lot of critique in workshops and classes already so I didn’t cry after my first MFA workshop (much). I was little high that year because I’d just had a story I cared about deeply accepted by a journal I had long admired: “A Single Fact Can Spoil a Good Argument” appeared in 2006 in CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, 30th anniversary issue. So there was that.

I refused to give up on “The Promised Hour” story. I rewrote it shorter and longer, dozens of drafts, retyped the entire thing, cut, deleted, rewrote, expanded. I changed almost everything, changed things back too. I renamed it a few times, wrote new scenes, rearranged events front to back and up and down. Submitted it dozens of times and often received positive feedback from good journals. I wrote an entire novel based off that short story (76k words), then carved it back down to the short story I first envisioned and submitted again to CALYX Journal. (There were still corrections.) I thank Senior Editor, Brenna Crotty for her skill and generous help getting the best out of my story, and Managing Editor Beth Russell who encouraged me to send work.

What you will find at CALYX combines two experiences from my life. In college, a child cried from a rental behind mine. I called everyone from the Seattle police to the Public Health Nurse (I did, in fact, knock on the door just as Thena does), but in 1970, even though I did eventually get the police to come, nothing came of it so far as I know. However, another true story was the real trigger for this one. I knew a doctor who did what Thena’s husband did, more than twenty-five years ago. In 2004, I began writing in order to answer the burning question: how do you ever get over something like that? I am interested, always and most urgently, in what comes next.

Sixty-three submissions, at least that many drafts, a complete novel, and nearly twenty years to get here. Shows what stubborn (and maybe a little stupid) can do. Luck too.

Print.