The first email I read this morning was a surprise bit of fan mail. It came from the editor of an online magazine, saying she had read my new piece of flash fiction in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and really enjoyed it, so much so that she wondered if I’d consider submitting something written in the same vein to her publication. This was a fine thing to wake up to, not only because it feels good to be complimented and solicited in a single breath (at least for me, seeing as how I’m not a woman being whistled at on the street), but also because I hadn’t known the piece had yet gone live. The story is called “Scenery v. Scene,” and was written during one of my fellowships with the Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Lovell, Maine. It was inspired, in part, by a poem by W. S. Merwin.

 […] a green and striking snake bites her thumb, pearly fangs buried to its purple gums and poison welling blackly to mix with her blood. She begs the boyfriend to get her a knife, to cut free its venomous mouth. But what the boyfriend brings her is a butter knife […]

And, to develop on this theme of well-received compliments, Emily Young of The Chart recently wrote this extended review of my new collection Cream River and one of the book’s corresponding multimedia performances, Don’t Pump Gas in the Presence of My Corpse. It’s a great review, possibly most of all because it is critical in a nuanced, inquisitive, non-binary way. Check out “On Ecstatic Milk Enjoyment, Discomfort, and Not Pumping Gas in the Presence of Douglas W. Milliken’s Corpse” in the latest issue of The Chart.