This is just a very brief post to sign off from what has been a hugely enjoyable month as writer in residence over here at Necessary Fiction. Now that April is coming to an end, I’m looking forward with some trepidation to a May filled with piles of student papers in need of grading.

Having said that, some time in the middle of the coming month, I’ll be sneaking off to Canada to spend a few days at the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programmes conference on Creative Writing in the 21st Century: Research and Practice, so any readers of Necessary Fiction at the CCWWP conference, do come along and say hello. It would be great to chat face-to-face.

It has been a pleasure and a privilege to publish and talk to some of the writers that I admire over the past month. I’m grateful in particular to Bhagwant Punia, Jonathan Taylor, Kathleen Bell and Hannah Stevens for allowing me to publish their work, and it was great to have a chance to interview Maria Taylor about her forthcoming collection, Melanchrini.

It has been fun, too, to brazenly take the opportunity to publish a number of the stranger stories from my work-in-progress, A Book of Changes, so sparing the inboxes of any more editors of small literary journals, as well as to talk more broadly about my writing, my recent children’s book The Snorgh and the Sailor, and my forthcoming (Summer 2012) novel, The Descent of the Lyre.

For any readers curious enough to want to continue to keep tabs on me, my regular website is over at WillBuckingham.com, and my currently somewhat neglected (but by no means forgotten) blog on matters philosophical can be found at thinkBuddha.org, so do pay a visit over there if you like.

Next month at Necessary Fiction promises to be intriguing too, with guest editor Mary Kovaleski Byrnes presenting all kinds of work from the EmersonWRITES community writing programme at Emerson College, a free programme of workshops for high school students in the Boston area. It should be an exciting month, and I look forward to hearing more about the project.

But all that remains for me to do now is to sign off, to thank everybody who has stopped by to read my posts over the past month or so, and finally to thank Steve Himmer, for his generous invitation to contribute. Necessary Fiction is a delight: long may it flourish!