A big honor from a blog I admire

For a few years, I've been trading comments with Karen Carlson, whose blog "A Just Recompense" discusses, year after year, every story from the anthologies Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Anthology. I've complained before that literature has almost no community. We read that BASS and Pushcart are influential anthologies, yet if you try to find discussions about stories from them online, it's pretty slim pickings. Compare that to the million YouTube viewers of a Rick and Morty remix that comes out just a few days after the latest episode. Karen's determination to keep blogging about these stories--in between the many MOOCs she takes to improve herself--gives us one place a writing community can assemble to find other people to whom literature matters and to talk about literature that's worth talking about.

Today, Karen posted about my book. I won't go over what she had to say about it; you can go read that for yourself. What's important to me is that it's given me a chance to talk about things that were once just in my head. Really, this is why I write. Something is burning a hole in me, and the only way to get it out is to put in on paper. Once it's there, I want to find a good reader somewhere to look at it and talk about it with. You can agree or disagree, like it or dislike it, as long as you read it intelligently. Talking about literature is always great, because you're talking about ideas that matter. Talking about literature you wrote is a whole other level, because it's the most important ideas to you, personally.

Getting a book published, even a small, artsy book of short stories read by a small number of people, can be thrilling and also incredibly saddening. There's the exhilaration of knowing that what you wrote will now have semi-permanence, but also the depression when it's over of knowing that life goes on like before.

Getting the chance to talk to people about the book is really the best part of the whole experience. It's an honor that I got to talk to Karen about it, and that she extended the conversation to her readers.