Things are going well in my very small corner of the writing world.

Last Sunday Anchorage Daily News ran an article about my Best American Sports Writing essay, The Prayer of an Alaskan Runner. (Complete with the picture of me with The Beebs.)

 

Friday I learned that my essay Running was chosen as a Notable selection for the 2013 Best American Essays.  

Today I found out that my still unpublished memoir Hunger was chosen as a finalist in the 2013 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Oh, my! If my head swells any bigger, I’ll have to buy a larger hat. Though even as I write this, my shoulders hunch against the inevitable. The pendulum will soon swing downward and if I happen to be in its way, it will happily hack me to pieces.

Until then, though, I’m going to sit at my desk and write all week. Hopefully, when I finally peer up from my dense writerly fog, my second novel will be finished and sent off to my agent.

And I will have a life again. That is, until I begin my next book.

News:  I’ve been thinking a lot about Joyce Carol Oates lately. Her book Do With Me What You Will made me understand that I was a writer, that I had been writing inside my head all of my life. I have a picture of her propped by my writing desk, along with Virginia Woolf, two of my writing besties. Anyway, Oates wrote a wonderful story, Lovely, Dark, Deep that ran in Harpers and according to the Washington Post, “contains a wicked takedown of the kindly grandfather of 20th-century American verse: Robert Frost.” Read Oates’ story and then the Post’s piece: Joyce Carol Oates Skewers Robert Frost as a sexist, racist old bore. I highly recommend both.

 

More news: It’s almost the end of the month, which means writing contest deadlines loom near. My picks? Glimmer Train Family Matters contest; Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Nonfiction; Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize (poetry), all with Oct. 31 deadlines. And Creative Nonfiction Mistakes themed issue, deadline Nov. 1.  Good luck!

Last of the news: This has nothing to do with writing but it’s so funny and odd that I can’t stop thinking: If he had waited a minute before going to the bathroom…. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Check it out here: Moose Hunter Accidentally Shoots Man on Toilet in Norway.