I have two new essays coming out soon in Fourth Genre and Cutbank, which I’m super excited about, and they both take their titles from clickbait articles. It’s a project I’ve been slowly, slowly working on during breaks between The Long Thing (I’m too superstitious to call it a novel, except in a whispered voice in a dark room), and it’s so much fun. The idea is to either use an existing clickbait article as a title or partial title, or make one up yourself–I like the ones with numbers because they suggest a form–and use that idea/structure to write something true about yourself. I have a huge list of possible titles that I haven’t yet written, including “The 7 Stages of ___” (Invisibility? Fatigue? Buyer’s Regret?), “9 Things That Make You Unlikable” (this one is straight from Forbes, unedited), “13 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married” (from The New York Times), “10 Reasons to Binge Watch ____,” “Reasons for Daylight Savings Time,” “Cures for Nightmares….” So many possibilities! One of my favorite kinds of prompts for creative nonfiction is to juxtapose two or more unlike things and see how they speak to each other. I’d love to find other ways to work content and form against each other!

Head’s up: I’m taking a break from consulting as I work on The Long Thing through winter and spring this year, but I hope to get back to your writing soon! Wish me luck!

With Animal, the collaborative collection of short stories I wrote with Carol Guess, has been translated into Thai and will be released next month! This collection is accompanied by some truly gorgeous artwork that I couldn’t be more thrilled about. Here are a few of images and a video, but check out Chaichai books on Facebook and Twitter to see more!

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fchaichaibooks%2Fvideos%2F548166762181883%2F&show_text=0&width=560

This is my resolution for 2017, and if it’s yours too, I offer a few of mine that have recently come out or are going to soon:

The Neighborhood — a collection of fairy tales and retellings

A Guide to Strange Places: Stories — a chapbook of stories, each of which gives a setting its own point of view

The Reckless Remainder — a collection of prose poetry, co-written with Carol Guess (coming out in May 2017)

I’m very excited about these books, and I’d be happy to send signed copies to anyone who’d like one. Email me at kmagee29@gmail.com for more information!

“Once a girl found a stray tornado. She lured it inside with a dog biscuit.”

Check out a new story of mine, “Origin Story,” in Eleven Eleven. This story is from my collection, The Neighborhood, which will be out soon from Gold Wake Press.

Nimrod International Journal has just released their themed issue, “Mirrors and Prisms: Writers of Marginalized Orientations and Gender Identities,” and they’ve included my story “Nobody Understands You Like You” in it. Read it here.

The story is about a woman who may or may not have accidentally adopted a pet wolf, and though the story has queer content, the call for submissions for this issue was specifically about the identity of the writer, not the content of the writing. I’m really interested in the different ways attention to inclusivity and diversity are playing out in the literary marketplace. What are the reasons to issue a call for writing about marginalized orientations vs. a call for stories by writers who consider themselves part of that marginalized group?

As I’m gearing up to teach a course on Queer Literature this fall, I’ll be thinking about questions like this, so I’m really happy to have my own work in the mix! I hope you check out all the great work by writers in this issue!