3 November 2023
/I have 2 new place-based poems in Packingtown Review: “Glitch” is set in my current neighborhood, the Financial District of NYC; “Fable” is set in my old neighborhood of Bermondsey in London.
9 January 2023
/I have a new flash piece online at Reflex Fiction. The title is “Magic/Show,” and it’s a bit of an ars poetica.
1 August 2022
/My novella manuscript titled Life / Insurance has won the 2022 Fugere Book Prize from Regal House Publishing and will be coming out in 2024. It’s a collaged novella about a collage artist trying to piece together her life by questioning her husband, a composer who is unable to talk.
5 April 2022
/I have a new flash fiction (“Elevator Repair”) in LEON Literary Review. (Reading time is about the length of an elevator ride.)
26 August 2020
/I have a tiny story called “Big Game” online at Unstamatic.
16 April 2020
/A selection from my unpublished novella manuscript called Life/Insurance is featured in Weekend Excerpts at Los Galesburg press. Here’s a sample: “What I mean is that I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. To be stuck, trapped, wrapped up in all these bandages. Unable. Do they have a balm?”
17 January 2020
/I am going to be at the Tucson Festival of Books, March 14-15, and reading from an unpublished novel manuscript, an excerpt of which won the festival’s Fiction Prize this year. I will be on a panel with other award winners to discuss our work and answer questions (on Sunday, March 15, from 1pm to 2pm, at the Student Union Sabino at the University of Arizona campus). More details here.
The manuscript I’ll be reading from is called “Life/Insurance,” and it’s a collaged novel about a collage artist whose husband is immobilized and uncommunicative while she tries to piece together what happened to him and what happened to her life.
31 October 2019
/I have a new creative nonfiction piece (“Word” in Construction magazine) that is about the construction of a creative nonfiction piece.
3 June 2019
/I have been collaborating with artist Holly Pobis and have written a series of micro fictions (and poems) to accompany her hand-colored photographs of South Carolina coastal scenes. The art is for sale at Etsy shop MarshAndLight.
30 April 2019
/I have a new flash piece (“On the Edge of Chinatown”) in Unbroken, a journal of “prose poems and poetic prose.” A sample: “The window washers must stop before the storm starts. That work takes forever, back and forth, erase a streak, remove a line of water.”
1 March 2019
/I have a short-short in the new issue of Passages North called “Group Tour.” It was inspired by some complaints my mother-in-law made about traveling. “Other people had leg cramps while walking through the ruins. Or they talked on the phone late at night, telling everyone that everything was beautiful.”
17 July 2018
/“Bits of autobiography” in fiction “provide a different texture, the way different kinds of paper work together in a collage.” —my thoughts on mixing personal experiences into your work in “Filtering Fact through Fiction” by Jack Smith in the August issue of The Writer magazine.
8 June 2018
/That Night Alive is the featured book this week at Snowflakes in a Blizzard, which highlights under-the-radar books. (I answer questions such as "Why this title?" and "Why would someone want to read it?")
2 April 2018
/“I dream of the shine and the finish: the bangles and rings. Silver and gold.” —from “Mirror Finish,” winner of the 2017 American Literary Review award for nonfiction. It’s an essay in fragments about metalsmithing, about writing, and about (city) living. You can read it online in the Spring issue.
27 March 2018
/I have a new poem (“Loading Zone”) over at Barnstorm journal. It’s about a walk in New York City—or a million walks, really. “Someone is sweeping up the trash, / someone is being swept away.”
1 February 2018
/“Metalsmithing sounds serious, ancient, mysterious. It sounds dangerous. Maybe I’m mistaking it for alchemy.” My essay about metalsmithing (and other things) is the winner of the 2017 American Literary Review award for nonfiction (it will appear in the Spring issue).
30 October 2017
/"In a novella, nothing is a distraction. There is no filler." One of my thoughts about the genre in "The Novella: Stepping Stone to Success or Waste of Time?" by Jack Smith, online at The Writer magazine.
2 August 2017
/I have a flash fiction (“Aftermath at the Museum with Fragments of Sappho”) in the final issue of Ink & Coda, an online journal of prose and music.
14 May 2017
/I have three new poems over at Across the Margin. (Some of the inspirations for these: beach in SC, hike in Bhutan, Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar.")
9 May 2017
/There’s a new wonderful review of THAT NIGHT ALIVE over at Heavy Feather Review: “Even in choosing to tell this story in reverse, Deal achieves a character whose identity unfolds from beginning to end. We move from a restricted, quiet narrator to one with voice, opinion, and life. Deal achieves all the elements of surprise and intrigue that a conventional novel does and more, asking her reader to probe the text, to sift for clues and connections that illuminate the story.”