9. Laura Goldstein interview—lots about chapbooks here. Personally, I used to believe chapbooks were some form of stepping stone and it often works that way: lit mag/chapbook/book-book, etc., but now I am seeing more authors scatter in chapbooks throughout their writing lives…almost in the way flash fiction might break up a longer story collection. Anyway, Laura has some thoughts on said subject.

2. Got a hybrid, a novella, a bookie-wookie? Mud Luscious Press is open for submissions (Note: They have a reading fee.)

 3. Not a lot of gender questions but some—my favorite moment was at Reed College, which is super liberal and very academic and a little pressured because of that.  Great place, but a little pressured.  I read a story called “Debbieland” about junior high school girls beating up a girl and after, someone asked why I wrote about such broken women and girls. And as a woman, didn’t I feel a responsibility to write strong women? I loved it as a question because it sets me up so beautifully to contradict that assumption.  A perfect pitch to an eager bat.  Because who wants to write strong all the time? Or read strong?  Who is strong all the time

4. Wells Tower with a Mitt Romney (sort of—there’s other interesting tidbits, in the legacy of riding-on-the-bus journalism) profile:

5. The jury’s still out on whether Modernism exists, or whether it’s just a way of being snobbish about people like Orwell, who tends not to make the cut.

8. Elizabeth Bachner mashes us some Decadent sick/goodness. Beautiful writing.

Odds are I’m alive, but right now I don’t know whether I’m wrapped in animal or riding one. Either way I don’t know which kind of animal it is, or whether I can hold on, and if I don’t hold on will it still keep running? Maybe I’m not a monument to anything.