So, I just finished talking to one of the projects assistants on the phone and I’m happy, shocked, and (completely fucking) stoked to announce that a flash nonfiction piece of mine will be published in the New York Times in a few weeks in the Modern Love column for their Tiny Love Stories project. I can’t begin to explain how incredibly important, even life-changing this news is for me in a small but important way. See, I’ve been trying to publish several works of nonfiction of mine about our struggle with infertility, but until now, no journal or literary magazine has shown much interest in publishing my work about that issue, which has been insanely disappointing for me considering that LB lit begged me to write an essay that told our story and also considering that the question of fertility has been told—understandably, but also detrimentally—by women authors almost exclusively. Within the context of infertility nonfiction, male voices are conspicuously absent and/or ignored and that’s a blind spot in publishing. So, this piece of flash nonfiction, is a short, compact retelling of that moment. It’s about the way we survived the most traumatic and painful episode of our lives together, by buying tickets to Prague we couldn’t afford to escape the site of our own trauma, to heal together, to escape to the present (pardon the oxymoron), and to rediscover our love for each other, which had been buried underneath devastation, ultimately becoming the thing that saved us.
Anyway, even if it’s a very short piece, this is a huge deal for me to get a piece accepted in the New York Times and it’s also a huge deal for us too to have witnesses to our love, trauma, and struggle. I cried when I wrote it and I hope readers cry too when they read it.