Last year, motivated perhaps by my inability to be more prolific, I decided to start sending out short stories from my first book Publick Spanking (1996) to see whether anyone might be open to republishing any and thereby give them a second life. Only one got picked up in 2023: "Gertrude Stein Is Dead" over at The Collidescope, a website devoted to subversive writing. (And what was Stein if not subversive?) Then earlier this year, editor Jonathan Penton picked up two others -- "Going Nowhere" and "The Blow" -- for Unlikely Stories Mark V. Both brief tales were originally published in two girls review, a beautifully executed, short-lived publication co-founded by novelist Lidia Yuknavitch in the '90s. "Going Nowhere" is pure flash fiction, packed with symbols, also nodding to Stein; "The Blow" is an excerpt from my monologue Queer Notions, and owes much more to performance artist Tim Miller than the lifelong love of Alice B. Toklas. You can read both stories over at Unlikely Stories today -- and depending how the internet goes -- maybe forever.
Photograph of fire-engine red toy bus comes courtesy of its creator kalamoku on Pixabay.