Quick recap on the life o’ Jackie

1) 34th Parallel has an interview with me and the first short story I ever wrote in their 5th issue.

2) I started Bennington’s MFA program in January. Best decision ever. It’s a low-residency program, so I have to go up to Vermont twice a year for 10-day residencies. The rest of the time I work from home and mail in packets of writing and book annotations to my professors.

This is my book list this term:

Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game by William Kennedy
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Falconer by John Cheever
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Beautiful Children by Charles Bock
Drown by Junot Díaz
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories by Aimee Bender
Affliction by Russell Banks
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Wonders of the Invisible World by David Gates
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
In the Bedroom by Andre Dubus
In Cold Blood Truman Capote
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips

3) Word Riot Press news: New version of Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca arrived from the printer. Galley copies for World Takes by Timmy Waldron are in the works.

4) I have a reading in Mass. coming up:

Dire Reading Series
Friday, March 6, 2009 @ 8 p.m.
106 Prospect Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts