Janey took the above photo somewhere off I-80 west of Iowa City at the end of December. We'd spent the night in Iowa City mostly so we could shop at Prairie Lights and eat some good food before the new year began and I had to go back to school.

About a week later, I received a phone call from the University of Iowa Press letting me know I'd won the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, juried by Jim Shepard*, for my story collection, Tell Everyone I Said Hi.

I've spent most of the past month ecstatic, wanting badly to share the news, and yesterday it finally became official. You can read the press release here, and you should, since it also contains some info on Marie-Helene Bertino and her 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning collection Safe as Houses.

I quit Facebook about a year and a half ago, but Janey's starated an author page for me, hoping people will 'Like' it. Which is always the case, it seems. You make the thing and hope somebody out there finds it and spends some time with it, that they find that time they spent worthwhile.

*Jim Shepard! Whose stories I love. Whose novel Project X is one of my favorite little books.

I spend a lot of my time preparing to teach classes. This usually involves reading either "professional" stuff or early drafts of student fiction and nonfiction. Whatever I'm reading, I tend to go at it heavily with a pencil, altering sentences, asking questions in the margins, jotting down talking points at the end of the thing. It's kind of become a way of being for me, this communicating with other texts while holding a pencil in my hand.

I decided a while ago that I wanted to make texts that arose wholly out of the words and images and questions I left behind on other people's work, but I kept putting it off for some reason. Finally, last year, I began jotting my notes down before I returned the story to the student or the book to the shelf. I sort of liked what they were doing. I titled a folder in my computer "Feedback" and began depositing texts there. I sent around queries to a couple of online magazines to see if they'd be interested in something like a monthly column where I could publish a couple of these pieces, but no one bit. HTMLGIANT, however, liked the idea, and decided to publish one of the examples I sent. You can read it--and a slightly different explanation of what I'm getting up to with this project--here.

After that piece came out, I was contacted by an editor, Nicholas Liu, who told me about the inaugural issue of a magazine he was in the process of putting together: Unswept. From the journal's website: "It owes its name and mission to the genre of mosaic called the asarotos oikos, or unswept floor. Its overriding interest is in the already-given—not just the canon, but what was published last month, or yesterday, or which has been consigned to the ash heap of literary history—and what writers do with it."

He asked me to send him some pieces, and he liked them, and I'm so glad, because the journal looks really beautiful, and that first issue has quite a lineup. You can read my stuff here. But I suggest you start at the beginning.

Photo courtesy of Jane. It's the home her ancestors built and lived in for several generations, not too far from here.

Speaking of feeling things...I believe I posted a video of Tom Waits' "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" last year, but I'mma post it again, because it slays me. Happy holidays, everybody.

I'm putting this up here so I remember to watch it when I have an extra minute. Anne Carson is one of my absolute favorites.

Thanks to Matt Bell for making me aware of it.

I've enjoyed for a while the various projects the writers in resdience over at Necessary Fiction have come up with, and I was thrilled when Kathy Fish, December's Writer-in-Residence, asked me to send something her way.

I submitted an old story that was supposed to be published a long time ago but never saw print because the magazine kind of disappeared. It's called "Moussaoui Remembers Fire," and you can read it here. A pretty lengthy author's note follows the story, so I'll hold off on saying anything else for now, other than this:

I adore Kathy's stories, and I'm humbled she thought to ask me to contribute. Plus: I'm glad this story is finally making its way into the world. It seems Kathy's put together a pretty aweome line-up for the holidays, so keep checking in over there. I know I will be.

 As (almost) always: The above photo appears courtesy of Jane.

A couple of lit mags I've recently received in the mail: Midwestern Gothic & Fifth Wednesday Journal. If the cover of Midwestern Gothic looks familiar it's because Janey took the photo, which appeared on this blog a while back. It's of the bowling alley here in Monmouth, long gone out of business. We found out that her image had been chosen for the cover about two weeks after the editors accepted my story "Your Place in the World," which appears in Issue 3 alongside all kinds of excellent, including pieces by my friends Cyn Kitchen and Kevin McKelvey and Jason Lee Brown.

This issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal contains my essay "On Helplessness." I haven't had much of a chance to read through the rest of the issue, but I can say this: It's gorgeous. I've received a lot of pleasure from just holding the thing in my hands, and I'm thrilled to have this essay find such a great home.

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This past weekend I drove south with six students to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where we participated in this crazy three-part reading organized by the interns at Slash Pine Press, Slash Stitch Burn. You probably weren't there, which is too bad, because it was a lot of fun. There was a reading in the morning at a haunted mansion. There were walking tours that involved undergrads and grad students reading historical and/or invented fictions/poems inspired by Tuscaloosan haunts. And then that night there was a bonfire and hula-hooping and juggling. I read while the bonfire roared at my back and a kind young man lighted my manuscripts with an electric lantern. I read this--and that recently published essay I mentioned above. It really was a pretty great day.

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Last April, Twelve Stories published a little story of mine, and then a couple months later, they asked if I'd like to come on board to help edit the fourth issue. I don't do much of this kind of thing, but I said yes and then got busy reading submissions and discussing the stories with the other editors--Molly Gaudry and Eugene Cross. Last week, Issue 4 went live. You should go and check it out. Right now.

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Origami Zoo Press has decided to put another book out into the world. (They just made the announcement, and I'm pretty excited about it, I must say. You can read more here.) Do you remember the first chapbook Origami Zoo Press released? It looked like this:

It sold out its limited-edition run pretty quickly, which was great, but then it just kind of disappeared. You know, like a phantom. Now, though, to celebrate their return, they've re-released Phantoms as an e-book for the Kindle. It's priced to sell, and filled with nine little stories that might be just the kind of thing you'd like to read on your electronic reading device. Maybe? Think about it? Additional versions may or may not be forthcoming. I'll try to keep you updated.

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Lastly: Jane and I started a new collaborative project in early October. This particular post has gone on long enough, so I'll say only this: It's about food and my late mother's recipes and the Midwest and family and cooking and nostalgia.

The above photo wasn't taken in The Woodlands, Texas. Jane took it on one of our drives, somewhere near Keithsburg, I think. We were over that way the other night to pick some blueberries, but I didn't see any roadside ponds or geese.

Thanks to a late freeze, the crop at the U-Pick blueberry place isn't so great. The farmer let us know this before we started picking, and it occurred to me: There is no one quite so pessimistic as a farmer. There are probably reasons for this, though.

The reason for this post: I have a new story up over at American Short Fiction. If you want to, you can call me Mr. July. The excellent Marian Oman also asked me some questions about the story, and you can find my answers here.

Last fall, my story "American Bulldog" was published in a theme issue of the Crab Orchard Review devoted to writing from and about Illinois. I wrote a little blog post about the pride I felt when this story appeared, and about the time I've spent wrangling with my identity as a Midwestern writer and person, about my love/hate relationship with this place I've lived most of my life, about my love/hate relationship with myself. Well, maybe it didn't delve too deeply into those things, but it could have.

I'll say this, now: When I talk to students sometimes about where I'm from or about where they're from, I encourage them to feel some pride for that place. They can get mad at it--they can even hate it--but they can't do just that. I then flash my version of a gang symbol: My ring and middle fingers twined, my thumb tucked, I point the horns of my index and ring fingers toward the ground, making an M, and then I flip it over to make a W. Usually, as I execute this little maneuver, I'll bark out 'Mid-West' like I'm one of the people who calls things out during a drum line performance. My students laugh, and it's supposed to be funny, but not just that.

I think there's something about the Midwest that is opposed to being proud, even of the place where you grew up. The problem with this is that if we Midwesterners aren't speaking up for it, or representing it in our fiction and photography and films, then we're going to be stuck with outsiders' renditions of this place, which aren't always so generous or accurate, which we might not even recognize. 

A couple months ago, Ohio University Press released an anthology, New Stories from the Midwest, designed to shed some light on this region of mine, and I was thrilled that the editors, Jason Lee Brown and Jay Prefontaine, were able to make such a thing happen. Here is a snippet of what Lee Martin has to say in his introduction to the book:

"The nineteen writers in this anthology have … spoken for their distinct groups — their submerged populations — in stories that will delight you with their artistry, challenge you with their circumstances, entertain you with their charms, and above all, give you a sense of how complicated, flawed, ugly, and exquisite we all can be.”

Then, very recently, I received an email from Jason Lee Brown letting me know that my story "American Bulldog" had been selected for next year's anothology, guest-edited by fellow midwesterner (and, like Lee Martin, one of my favorite writers) John McNally, which will be published next year by Indiana University Press. The contributor's list, too, is stacked with some of my favorite writers, some of those people, actually, who taught me how to see this place in new ways, who helped show me how I might be able to write about it.

Photo by Jane. She and I have driven by this sign, which stands near the road next to the Eagles Club here in Monmouth, hundreds of times, but neither one of us noticed that "Dances Alone" bit until just last week. We're trying to decide if it was recently added or if we'd just missed it all along.

Ken is smiling. His hair is a little wrecked. He is shirtless. You can see the seam where his shoulder connects with his torso.

Which is to say: I was honored a few weeks back to learn that my manuscript of stories, Tell Everyone I said Hi, was one of three finalists for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books. I do love Sarabande, and I do wish I would have won, as that little book of mine has now been a bridesmaid in not one, not two, but three national contests, twice at Sarabande and twice more at two other presses who run pretty excellent contests for story manuscripts. Still, like Ken, I’m smiling. Honored to have my name listed alongside writers like Karen Brown and Daniel Mueller and Andy Mozina and Maura Stanton. And, like Ken, who was placed inside a light box Jane made in order to have the above photo snapped, I am humbled. It's as if I’ve showed up somewhere I didn’t even realize I’d been invited not wearing a shirt. It's as if all the seams holding my parts together are visible, ready at any moment to split.

In other news...I wrote in my very last blog post about Mariposa and my story "fourteen," published last fall at matchbook. Then, last weekend, I found out that "fourteen" had been listed as one of the storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2010, along with a bunch of cool stories I've read over the past year--and some I'm looking forward to reading. storySouth only distinguishes stories that are over 1000 words long, and so technically, this is the first story I've published online that qualifies for the distinction, which makes it even cooler to make the long-list. Fingers crossed this little piece o' mine, which Edward Mullany and Brian Mihok helped whip into shape, makes it to the next round...