I Have Always Been Here Before

It's been about a week since I learned that Cowboy Jamboree Press will be publishing my short story collection I Have Always Been Here Before in Feb/March 2020.

Cowboy Jamboree's online magazine has been around for a good while, specializing in grit lit, stories that, by CJ's definition, tend toward the "rural, hard-scrabbled, rough-hewn, pulpy, noirish ... and, of course, gritty." While some of my favorite writers -- Larry Brown, Denis Johnson, Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, et al -- are among the founding figures of the genre, and those are words I might use to describe my own stories if pressed to do so, I'd never really thought of my own writing that way until I stumbled across Cowboy Jamboree and felt at home there. One of the stories in this collection, "The Lizard Man of Okamassee County" was featured in the Summer/Fall 2018 issue of the magazine, and now I'm thrilled to be included in the initial CJ Press line-up along with four other writers whose work I love.

In the lead-up to the release of I Have Always Been Here Before, I'll be posting some notes on the individual stories that make up the collection, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can check out the first release, Sheldon Lee Compton's Appalachian noir novel Dysphoria, and get a sneak peak at the upcoming lineup here.