I’ve had some great news in the last 30 days. My story about violent ice cream truck competition called “The Ice Cream Dream” got picked up by MAKE Magazine, a Chicago lit mag I’ve admired for a long time. The story will show up in their Misfits issue, which is fitting.

My flash fiction piece “No Good for Digging” was a finalist in the Green Mountains Review Bralleboro Literary Festival Flash Fiction Contest. My story will go up online with them at some point this fall. This news was especially great for me, since one of my fellow finalists is Adam Schuitema. Adam was my mentor in undergrad, the teacher who first convinced me I should be writing. I owe him a lot of thanks.

I owe lots of people thanks, too, for helping me with these stories, and for reading my series of connected stories called Secrets of the Wild, which just won the Burning River Fiction Chapbook Contest. I’m so thrilled about this. The chapbook will be coming out around this time next year. The stories from Secrets of the Wild were drafted and workshopped at my MFA at Bowling Green State University, one of the best MFA programs around. So, thanks to Wendell Mayo and Theresa Williams and Lawrence Coates, the amazing faculty members who helped me with these stories. Especially thanks to Theresa, who always stuck up for Kevin–the silverback gorilla at the heart of these stories. And thanks to my awesome fellow MFAers Brandon Davis Jennings, Joseph Celizic, Megan Ayers, Aimee Pogson, Matt Bell, Anne Valente, Stephanie Marker, Jacqueline Vogtman, and Catherine Reed Keefe. I think I was the luckiest fiction writer who ever did an MFA to get to work with all of these stellar artists.