My friend and fellow Whidbey MFA graduate, Stefanie Freele, wrote a book of very short stories called Feeding Strays.  It was recently published by Lost Horse Press.  My copy has been sitting on my counter for a couple of weeks waiting to be picked up and read.  I have a hard time finding time to read anything but submissions and my kids’ homework anymore, but today is Sunday and I promised my daughter I’d take her to the park, so I grabbed the book on my way out the door.  Short-short stories are perfect for the park because you can look up frequently to check that your kid is a) not bleeding, and b) hasn’t been abducted, without interrupting the flow too much.

Am I rambling?

Anyway. Imagine my delight when I opened up the book and saw that my own self is listed in the acknowledgments!  Wow! I think that’s my first ever appearance on an acknowledgments page.  Pretty exciting stuff.  Surely that means I’m famous now, right?  (Ha.)  But even more thrilling were the stories.  Damn, Stef can tell a story.  Everytime I read anything she’s written I get all excited about short fiction (especially because I’m a very weird person inside my head, and serious weirdness is much easier to do in short-shorts than in poetry) and inspired to try my hand.  It’s a little scary — my training is all in poetry and I’ve only taken one short-short class — so I feel a bit like some Jane off the street trying to accomplish something I have no business dabbling in.  But what the heck. Worst case, I’ll have some fun with it.

As I was reading (and giving my daughter endless thumbs-ups from my bench, required each time she made it across the monkey bars without falling), acorns kept falling around me from the huge, old oak tree I was sitting under.  They were literally pelting me.  I started to worry about getting a concussion.  I didn’t, luckily, but I got an idea for a short fiction piece about being pelted with acorns.  It may or may not involve squirrels — it’s too early to know.  I can’t wait to get started.

While I’m doing that, I would encourage you, Dear Reader, to go buy Feeding Strays. With stories featuring titles like “Because Condoms Seems So Desperate, She Also Buys a Fern” and “Penile Bone,” how could you not?