A book. A book!

As the (new) homepage makes abundantly clear, I have some news: My debut short fiction collection, The Bedtime Emptying of Our World, won the 2024 Moon City Short Fiction award and will be published by Moon City Press in late 2025.

Here’s the pitch. The back cover copy? I don’t know. Here are the reasons why I hope you’ll want to buy this book:

To stop the desert from dying, a young girl and her grandfather rebirth the very idea of weather. A father and son tend to a grove of genetically modified saguaro cacti that grow at enormous speeds and in enormous pain; in another time, a different father watches with wonder and horror as his son transforms into the most beautiful of minerals; in a third, a father offers all is most beloved treasures in hopes the Gulf will return his lost son. While one girl escapes from the apple that was once her prison, another man agonizes his entire life to escape the spider’s web of choices his parents encoded into his genes.

The twenty-two stories of Joel Hans’ The Bedtime Emptying of Our World might vary in length and genre, but they each borrow from speculative fiction and fairy tales in equal measure, and set them against the vivid backdrop of the Sonoran Desert. From impossible quests to helpers to tiny lacks, new threads emerge: How can we reconcile with this impossible task of parenthood in all its permutations? When will the fairy-tale helpers come to rescue us? Can we find our way back from the edge of the void that has taken all the things we love most? Would we even like to try?

..

I’m about two weeks away from receiving the news myself, and a week from sharing the announcement on social media, and I remain some uncertain state of awe and disbelief. There were many times I thought this collection, or any book of mine, had become an impossible task I would chase around fruitlessly my whole life. Or give up trying.

The earliest story from this collection was first published in 2014—“A Man, His Oblations” in No Tokens—which means I probably wrote it sometime in 2013. That story got me accepted into the University of Arizona’s MFA program. That story was the backbone of much earlier and less refined versions of this collection, which I shopped around in 2014-2016, and had a few near-misses as a finalist in different contests. After finishing up my MFA, I entered what I’m now realizing is a nearly 10-year period of focusing almost exclusively on novels. A long era that ended with two books that went nowhere.

It wasn’t until 2022-203 that I felt reattached to the idea of writing short stories. Remembering why I loved them so much. What it would mean to me to have all my favorites, even some of the oldest, in one place. I polished up some old stories that never found a home and then found them lovely homes with amazing journals, found time here and there to write a few fresh ones, and here we are—having come through more doubts than I can count and more rejections than I would like to remember, the persistent feeling that a book would never happen for me, I, at the very least, never truly gave up.

Now it’s coming. A book. The book.

I hope you’ll buy a copy and read it. I would be forever grateful.