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 ot...