THE KISS! Edited by Brian Turner, W.W. Norton & Company, is debuting TODAY, February 13, 2018!

Featuring work by Benjamin Busch, Roxana Robinson, Patricia Smith, Andre Dubus III, Mark Doty, Honor Moore, Brian Castner, and so many more.

From Sioux Falls to Khartoum, from Kyoto to Reykjavik; from the panchayat forests of India to the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland; in taxis and at bus stops, in kitchens and sleigh beds, haystacks and airports around the globe—people are kissing one another. The sublime kiss. The ambiguous kiss. The devastating kiss. The kiss we can’t take back. The kiss we can never give. The kiss that changes a life. In this anthology, writers and thinkers share their thoughts on a specific kiss—the unexpected and unforgettable—in an attempt to bridge the gulf, to connect us to one another on a deeply human level, and to explore the messy and complicated intimacies that exist in our actual lives, as well as in the complicated landscape of the imagination.

This is a book meant to be read from cover to cover, just as much as it’s meant to be dipped into—with each kiss pulling us closer to the moments in our lives that matter most.

“A kiss, you see, can carry not just a heart in it, but a soul.” —from Pico Iyer, “The Kiss at Dawn”

“There are countries in that kiss, years of experience, ghosts of past lovers and the tricks they taught you.” —from Siobhan Fallon, “The Ride”

Not only is The Kiss full of great fiction and essays, but all the writers in the book donated all proceeds with 50% going to The Ocean Cleanup and 50% to editorial internships at Guernica Magazine.
Give your Valentine a dose of literary love that also does some good!

Find The Kiss at all your local indie bookstores, and everywhere else.

Amazon link here

Happy kissing!

Well, I was scolded for not taking better care of my blog by fellow mil spouse author Andria Williams last night (she said something along the lines of being sick of my ‘camel kissing’ photo from a past blog), so I’ve decided to quickly post before she beats me to it (take that, Andria!).

I’m warning you right now that this will be mostly a big gush. I’m so happy. I got off the plane Wednesday afternoon and just started smiling my face off and saying hello to everyone, and you know what? everyone smiled and said hello back!! People are friendly in Abu Dhabi, but I have missed looking total strangers in the eye, women and men (hurray, I can be friendly to men and not worry they will think I’m trying to seduce them!). I love America. I love the older man security guard here at the Hilton who started chatting with me when I was putting sugar in my coffee. The homeless man playing a little drum on the corner who said God Bless you when I gave him a dollar (though I was shocked to see homeless people again. No stray cats like the Middle East, but lots and lots of homeless people). The super friendly staff at Target (TARGET!!!) who chatted on and on about how nice my scarf was.

I am not the least bit jet lagged.

I mentioned this to Benjamin Busch last night at the Sierra Nevada College Reception and he claimed it was the air here, more oxygen, good for working out, but I’m convinced it’s just because I am in America.

The above ROCKED their panel, Women Writing War, with Andria Williams, Jehanne Dubrow, Emily Tedrowe, Katey Schultz.
I highly recommend everyone check out these authors’ varied and amazing work, I sat there jotting down notes from all of them (and feeling oddly, but nicely, uncomfortable, when Andria read a scene from one of my stories– people actually laughed where they were supposed to laugh). I was moved by line after exquisite line of Jehanne’s poetry (short excerpt below), by Emily Tedrowe’s heartfelt tackling of issues of authority and writing “credentials,” by Andria’s vast understanding of mil spouse literature, and Katey Schultz’s assertion that, though she’s not married to the military or a veteran herself, she was compelled to write about our wars out of “civic duty.”

I was on a panel, No Country for Good Old Boys: The Remaking of the Masculine in Contemporary American Fiction with heavy hitters Shann Ray, Kim Barnes, Alan Heathcock, Ben Percy. I’m kicking myself for not getting a photo, what a crew. I’d also like to quote our pre-panel discussion but I am afraid my mom might read this, particularly the comments about the appendages some of the above claim to write with… ahem, Ben Percy). They all have something in the pipeline, Percy’s newest novel, The Dead Lands, comes out next week.

Well, #AWP2015 is young, there is much ahead, I’m going to keep breathing this intoxicating American air and smiling my face off at every inspiring person I meet, writer or man playing drums!

P.S. If you are here at #AWP15, check out this kick*ss panel tomorrow, Saturday, 1:30-2:45, Telling Our New War Stories: Witness and Imagination Across Literary Genres, with Benjamin Busch, Phil Klay, Brian Turner, Katey Schultz, and me…

excerpt from Jehanne Dubrow’s work (from the online site Project Muse):

He brings me chocolate from the Pentagon,
dark chocolates shaped like tanks and fighter jets,
milk chocolate Tomahawks, a bonbon
like a kirsch grenade, mint chocolate bayonets.
He brings me chocolate ships, a submarine
descending in a chocolate sea, a drone
unmanned and filled with hazelnut praline.
He brings me cocoa powder, like chocolate blown
to bits. Or chocolate squares of pepper heat.
Or if perhaps we’ve fought, he brings a box
of truffles home, missiles of semisweet
dissolving on the tongue. He brings me Glocks
and chocolate mines, a tiny transport plane,
a bomb that looks delicious in its cellophane.