“Great story!” Bill Patrick, a published author and scriptwriter, sought me out to to admire a short story I’d written for a seminar he would teach in my Fairfield MFA program. We each wrote and circulated, before gathering, a piece to be critiqued in such seminars; it was unusual for a professor to comment before classes met and students had first crack, but he thought it an unusual story.
With help from him and my classmates (who also liked it), I improved it during that fortnight. We each did a reading to the student body and faculty. I read “Exoneration”, to applause.
I began sending it out — and sending, and sending, with growing discouragement. How could editors turn down a story everyone in the MFA program liked?
Three years later (!!) it was accepted by Aestas, an annual anthology. Then, to cap off my frustration, publication was delayed and delayed again!
It’s finally out, a year late, “Aestas 2017”. The whole book, a good collection of short stories, is currently bargain priced at Amazon — or you can read it ==>>here
them home.
10,000-foot ranger station on 18,000-foot Mount Kenya — and were told of an American who’d gotten lost recently, in a stunted landscape prowled by buffalo, elephants, monkeys . . . and leopards.
published the first story I got into print after completing my Fairfield University MFA, “Consultants.” I tried them again; they liked it. It’s just out in Summer 2018 Issue #160. I got a paper copy in the mail today. For whatever reason, their online version isn’t posted yet, but you can read “Matches” ==>
an idea spun into a short story that I knew would have limited or no appeal to the young adults, MFA students, who edit many of the country’s literary magazines. I sent it out to several anyway. No takers.
was compiling an anthology of short stories on the theme “black sheep”. I had a story about an unwelcome mourner at a burial service, which I thought might fit. It did. Volume 4 Number 4 is available at Amazon and other booksellers, but you can read it now 
May 2018 issue of the California-based Penumbra Art and Literary Journal, which includes my
themselves when I jot down and develop a fragment of memory or description of place. Empty Nest, just published in the Bowling Green online magazine, draws from a very real memory of taking our daughter to college. The rest, I assure you, is pure fiction.![Lowestoft Chronicle [postage stamp] Issue 33 March 2018](https://dononoel.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Screen-Shot-2018-03-01-at-11.33.35-AM-100x150.png)
middle-of-the-night initial encounter with Norodom Sihanouk, the monarch/president. It was also my first trip with the cyclopousse (pedicab) driver who would somehow always be available when I wanted to go somewhere — and who would ultimately confess that he reported on my travels to the police once a week.