NEA Grant for Judy Frank! and other folks, too

Hey, look who's getting an NEA grant this year!

It's my pal, Judy Frank, who wrote Crybaby Butch, and who has given me really wonderful editing and response around Spider in a Tree! This is a very exciting and wonderful thing, support for her new book-in-progress. Judy rocks. Oh, I can barely type for grinning and beaming and being delighted about this. It's so good.

I met Judy because we were both published by Firebrand. Before that, my novels were published by Spinsters, another small women's press, and one of their authors, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, is also on the list.

And so is John D'Agata, who will always have a soft spot in my heart because, as an editor of a literary journal, he once wrote me in a rejection letter that he'd had a big argument about whether or not an essay written in sections based on the sections of a geological map that I'd sent in would be published. He lost, and they didn't publish it, but they published the next thing I sent, and he introduced me to the term "lyric essay," which best described what almost all of my essays are, and which is the kind of nonfiction I most love.

Early December

Also, in triking news:

• The last time I got on my trike, it was so cold that the gear shift on the handle bar had frozen in place, and I couldn't get it to go into anything but first.


• Today, the gear shift had thawed, but the road from the bike path to the street that the Y is on wasn't plowed, so my wheels were just spinning in place. I had to get off and walk it up that little hill. There's ice that started out as slush under everything.


• I went swimming for the first time in more than a week, which felt great, but then I rode home with wet hair, which froze into icicles. (Perhaps that was good for it -- it's having a randomly fetching moment right now, says me, despite having been unceremoniously plopped up and clipped to the top of my head.) There's a crack in part of the plastic around the gear shift that I should duct tape, I think, to try to keep moisture from getting in there.


• I'm in such a better mood if I get out on the trike than if I don't. But I'm finding all of this cold and ice daunting.


• I want one of those face masks with slits for the eyes, nose and mouth


• If I don't trike, I have to walk.