Writing — and perhaps even more than writing, publishing — can be a long, slow, often frustrating thing to do with your life and it can seem like the victories are few. But this week I’ve been fortunate to hear from a number of friends about their recent successes, whether it’s their books on prize lists, new jobs and opportunities arising via their work, author copies of their new books received, or other moments at which it feels like someone out there gets what you’re doing and appreciates that you are. Which is no small thing! Most folks who have been writing and sending their work out for a while already know how rare those moments can be, and also know that when those moments arrive for friends and peers we’ve come up alongside, it can be as thrilling and satisfying as our own successes. And, okay, it helped me keep a particularly stinging rejection of my own in perspective this week.

At some point in the past month or so it became fifteen years that I've been wrangling Necessary Fiction, after being invited aboard by Amy Guth and James Stegall as part of the micro-press So New Publishing. The litmag has outlived the press by quite a while now but I still like knowing it arose from organic connections between Amy, James, and myself and a shared interest in small scale community publishing and creating spaces for writers to just do their thing, and for celebrating them when they move onward and upward to bigger successes.

Anyway, here are the writers who did their thing with us this week:

On Monday, Gabrielle Stecher reviewed The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, a novel by Virginia Pye and published by Regal House. This is Gabrielle's second review for us, after writing about Jazmina Barrera's novel Cross-Stitch (translated by Christina MacSweeney) a few months ago. As it happens, Virginia is also a past contributor to the site and shared some research notes for her collection Shelf Life of Happiness in 2018.

Then we kicked off a month of nature-themed stories, selected by our fiction editor Lacey Dunham. This week’s story was "Climate Change" by Ilana Masad. This is Ilana's first time writing for us but you can find more of her work via her website.

Then on Friday, longtime friend of Necessary Fiction William Walsh shared some research notes about his novella The Poets, new from Erratum Press. Bill has written about some of his previous books, as well as spending a month as our writer in residence (the archives of which I really do need to figure out how to get back into order on this new hosting platform we moved to).

+

In news from elsewhere, congratulations to friend of Necessary Fiction John Cotter, whose memoir Losing Music has been named to the longlist for the Colorado Book Award in creative nonfiction. 

We were also thrilled to see both I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself by Marisa Crane and Brother & Sister Enter the Forest by Richard Mirabella among this year's LAMBDA finalists.

Meanwhile, contributor Brett Biebel recently published his story collection Gridlock, and Corey Farrenkopf's novel Living In Cemeteries will be published later this month.

Finally, submissions to our flash fiction summer series will be open until May 1.

Thanks for reading,
Steve Himmer