Publications

Allison

Won’t Be By Your Side Blurb from Keely O’Shaughnessy

I’m honored to share this blurb for my forthcoming chapbook, Won’t Be By Your Side.

I met Keely O’Shaughnessy when I was a priority editor at Flash Fiction Magazine. She’s the managing editor and fearless leader, and an amazing writer to boot! I kicked off Chapbook Week showcasing her book, The Swell of Seafoam, which you can get right now (free!) from Ghost City Press. The microchap is stunning, with the mysterious sea taking on a prominent role in each story.

Since then, Keely’s second book, Baby Is a Thing Best Whispered, came out with Alien Buddha Press. Once I stopped staring at the gorgeous cover, I dove in and the stories swept me away. The relationships in this book are realistic, even when that means they’re fraught with uncertainty and anxiety. Keely deftly inspires those emotions in the reader.

A few of my favorite stories include:

  • “Some Girls are Just Trashy and No Good,” about girls at the fair testing the limits of who they are and what they could become, with descriptions so vivid you can smell the food in the air as the colorful lights flash before your eyes.
  • “Adult Teeth,” about a family of women that hammer their baby teeth into a tree.
  • “Hidden in the Margins of a Gideon’s Bible,” a micro flash which… you just have to read.
  • “Love Is Riding the Log Flume at Splash Town in Late Summer,” which is about love and loss and the passage of time, told with heart-wrenching, brutal honesty.
  • “How to Bake Cookies When Your Child is Dying,” giving you step-by-step instructions on how to make cookies and think of anything other than your child dying, while deftly inserting emotion into each part of the recipe.

I need to stop before I highlight every story, but you get my gist. This flash fiction collection is one you don’t want to miss!

Allison

Cover Tease #2

The first cover tease was a photo taken during the same shoot, but that and the color scheme are the only common threads with the cover image itself. This tease is getting a little closer to the source…

Allison

Cover Tease #1

Spoiler alert: The cover of my upcoming chapbook is a photograph I took a few years ago. I’m never one to take a single photo and feel satisfied, so I usually take dozens (okay, hundreds) each shoot. I culled this specific shoot down to about 12 images, then picked my eight favorites. One is the cover—as soon as I titled the book, the image came to mind and just clicked. I tried another image and it wasn’t right, so I listened to my gut. But I still wanted to share the other seven pictures, so I planned out a few cover teases—and this is the first.

Allison

Chapbook Week: A Special Announcement

I’ve already reviewed seven titles for Chapbook Week, but I had to end with a special announcement:

My debut chapbook from Alien Buddha Press is coming September 23rd!

I’m excited to share the cover reveal, blurbs, and inspiration behind each piece in this collection.

Allison

“No Place Like Home” published at Atlas and Alice

Today my piece “No Place Like Home” is live at Atlas and Alice.

Like many of the other pieces I’ve had published recently, this started in a Kathy Fish workshop. It’s a piece of microfiction, so we already had strict word constraints (150 words or less). To add to the challenge, Kathy gave us a list of words to use—either in the piece itself, or as a jumping-off point. I used five of the ten words for the fun of it, though they definitely gave me the root of the story as well.

Other pieces published from Kathy Fish’s workshop:

“Witches Do That Sometimes” published at MicroLit Almanac
“The Man Who Would” published at Livina Press
Allison

Craft Essay: How to Develop Characters in Flash Fiction

I wrote a craft essay for Flash Fiction Magazine about creating characters in flash fiction. With such constraints, it’s easy to think something’s gotta go – plot, characters, a turning point. How can you find room for it all? Read the article for my insight.

Allison

Poetry and Photography in Versification

If you didn’t know I was a poet… well, you’ll soon find out why I keep that side of me under wraps.

In all seriousness, I’m proud of this acceptance because it came from THE ANGRY ROBOT running things at Versification Zine. It took me five tries of five line poems before I earned this acceptance. It was quite the rush that night, and now, seeing my poem in print… I’m really glad it’s paired with one of my favorite photographs of all time.

Check it out.

Allison

Three Photographs at Thimble Lit Mag

I’m excited to share three photographs published in the latest issue of Thimble Lit Mag.

Breakfast

Winding

Drink Me

I’m honored to have work included with so many talented authors and artists. Check out the whole issue at Thimble Literary Magazine.

Allison

Four Flash Pieces published at The Write-In

I love celebrating National Flash Fiction Day by reading flash pieces by my friends and new-to-me authors. I especially love the 25 writing prompts over 24 hours! This year a friend and I got together to write for some of those prompts on Saturday night. Sunday we polished our work and submitting pieces to The Write-In.

I’m pleased that four of my pieces were accepted for publication! You can read them here:

“The Girl Made of Colors”

“Recalculating…”

“I Thought You’d Never Call”

“The End”

You can see the prompt and other writers’ responses by clicking the tag on each post. It’s so fun to see how people interpret the same prompt in such different ways!

Allison

Those Who Scream: a Collaborative Novel

November is commonly known as National Novel Writing Month for writers, whether you participate or not. I’ve tried it off and on over the years, winning some, giving up some throughout the month. I’ve written a young adult book, a middle grade book, and a few story collections. But overall it’s hit or miss for me because I’m still not really sure I have a good novel in me.

When Thirty West Publishing House suggested a different approach to NaNoWriMo, I was all in. They called it #antiwrimo. Instead of one author writing a novel in a month, 30 authors would write one together.

Yes. A collaborative novel.

We had a Google doc for the book and a separate one for notes. On November 1st, the first author started the story. On the 2nd, the next author wrote their chapter. And so on. Some days had two authors because everyone wanted a part of this project. I wrote the 24th chapter and it was… wild. I was trying to keep up with the chapters as they were written so I’d have an idea of what to write myself. But then my day arrived and the story was in a totally different place. It was wild. And fun.

After some meetings for edits and consistency and a cover art contest, the final product came out at the end of May. And it’s amazing.

See?

It was definitely a fun experience to work with other writers like this. As someone who has always seen writing as fairly solitary (with the exception of writing groups), it was nice to be a part of something so massive. You can get your own copy of the book here, along with other amazing titles—I especially recommend Little Feasts and Spells of the Apocalypse.