"Both Sides of My Skin" Pre-Order Available!

When I was still teaching, I was faced with getting an obligatory master’s degree. All public school teachers in Massachusetts have to do this eventually to keep their licensure up to date, but it’s an awful lot of work to go back to school while still teaching school.

And for an English teacher (which I was for eight years), it’s kind of a nightmare. No one works harder than a high school English teacher. It’s a never-ending cavalcade of shit in the form of a bottomless stack of (terrible) papers to grade. When you layer additional coursework and research papers on top of that, you might as well kiss your sanity goodbye.

So I thought that choosing the Creative Writing concentration of an English M.A. would at least make it more fun and provide a layer of personal fulfillment to the mix. As long as I had to shell out thousands of dollars and hours for an advanced degree, I might as well enjoy it, right?

So that’s what I did. It was still a shit-ton of work, but when it was over I had a collection of short stories to show for it.

This was all many years ago, though. (To give you an idea, Senator Barack Obama spoke at my commencement.) Then those stories sat in a metaphorical drawer in the cloud for a long time.


Until now! Annorlunda Books is publishing the collection of short stories, along with a new afterword (that people should actually enjoy, instead of my bone-dry thesis essay).

While this is not a book about gardening or anything else food- or soil-related, you might still like to read it. It won’t officially be released until December — just in time for the holidays! — but you can pre-order an ebook or paperback copy right now.

And that’s probably a good idea, since your shopping list will only get longer as the month goes on. Do it now, and you’ll have a nice surprise waiting for you in December.

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