Alec Clayton It takes me a year or two to write a novel, which means I spend that much time getting to know each of the characters in my novels. And then I forget about them. I go on to my next novel and a new set of characters, and tend to forget the earlier ones. Literally. … Read more
I just finished the third complete rewrite of my latest novel, The Descendants of the Pirate Pegleg Josiah Johnson. Before we can publish it, Gabi Clayton has to edit it and design the cover, and before that, we have to publish two new books we’re working on: Mud Flate Verse, a collection of poems by … Read more
Gabi (my wife and co-founder of Mud Flat Press) came up with one of those brilliant why-didn’t-we-think-of-it-before ideas. We should have periodic Mud Flat Press Zoom events with writers and readers. We haven’t made any specific plans yet, but not much planning should be needed. We’ll invite writers who have published books with Mud Flat … Read more
by Alec Clayton It happened like this. I was looking for something on our Mud Flat Press website and noticed the page for the short stories we’ve published on the site. I thought, if we have a page for short stories, why not a page for poems? We certainly know enough poets—really good ones like … Read more
Gabi and I are thrilled to announce that Monday or shortly thereafter our publication from the 1980s, Mississippi Art & Letters, will officially enter into literary history. All copies of the magazine (10 issues from 1984 to 1985), along with correspondence from writers Jack Butler, Jes Simmons, Barry Hannah, Pat Gray, Howard Bahr, Ellen Gilchrist, … Read more
Two of our much-loved Mud Flat Press writers are expatriates—Ricker Winsor, originally from New York and now living in Surabaya, Indonesia with his Chinese Indonesian wife, Jovita and two dogs, Sniper and Nana; and Anne Nayer, also a New Yorker, a life coach in the Virgin Islands for the past 35 years. Anne lived and … Read more
At last, we’re going to start publishing poetry on the Mud Flat Press website. The format will be like the formatting for short stories (see https://mudflatpress.com/short-stories/). Like the short stories, poems will be by invitation only. We cannot accept unsolicited submissions. We will start with poems by Jes Simmons, Anne Nayer, Jack Butler—all contributors to … Read more
A new novel by Alec Clayton I’m not writing this. I’m screaming it. But only inside my mind. It’s all in my head. You are in my head. Left completely paralyzed and unable to talk after a stroke, newspaperman Willie Ray Rivers recalls his fight for justice in the little town of Hub City, Mississippi; … Read more
Having met Samuel Snoek-Brown at a Creative Colloquy reading and after reading his great Civil War novel Hagridden, I was anxious to invite him to submit something to the anthology Mud Flat Shorts (mostly fiction). He submitted two stories, “Godsend” and “Til all the Bones Are Buried,”an excerpt from a not-yet-published novel of the same … Read more
“Emmolene’s Bones” by Jack Butler may well be the strangest love story ever written. “Hawk Gumbo,” also by Jack Butler, is the quintessential Southern Gothic or Grit Lit story. “Godsend” by Samuel Snoek-Brown is the story of a woman obsessed with the thought of murdering her neighbor because the neighbor has irritating habits and sings horrendously. Both … Read more