I’ve been awarded a Project Grant from the Arts Council of Greater Greensboro for the development and publication of a new novel, Body of Trust. The book will feature art by Christine Kirouac, and an unusual physical design, handmade by Andrew Saulters.
The Reason the Dress is Yellow, a short story collection, will be published by Press 53 in September 2024.
A video representation of There Will Be No More Tears can be found on the Cloud Diary Youtube channel.
There Will Be No More Tears, another in the Mirrorbox series, was recently published in Harpur Palate.
Regiment, another entry in the Mirrorbox series, was recently published in Passengers Journal.
The Stain, part of the Mirrorbox series, was recently published in Drunk Monkeys.
I wrote something on publishing and faux-publishing for Lit Mag News: Doing a Lot with a Little or Very Little with a Lot: Small Presses, Contests, and Scams.
Altars, a short story, has been published in the Iron Horse Literary Review 24.2, the Bliss Issue.
Anthem has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Red Fez.
Ultimate Trip has been nominated by the North Carolina Literary Review for the Pushcart Prize.
There Will Be No More Tears, part of the Mirrorbox series, will appear in the Spring 2023 issue of Harpur Palate.
Ultimate Trip, winner of the Alex Albright 2021 Creative Non-Fiction Prize, has been published in the print edition of the North Carolina Literary Review.
Anthem has been published in the final double issue of Red Fez. Anthem is part of the Abigail project
There We Were, a text/music piece created with Gaye-Taylor Upchurch and Melanie Wallace appears in Issue 5 of the international artzine, Cartopodes. Search around for the appropriate orange dot here, but it’s best just to explore.
I See A Darkness, part of the Mirrorbox series, appears in the 10th Anniversary Issue of Drunk Monkeys.
Body of Trust, part of the Mirrorbox series, appears in the September issue of Passengers Journal. As an added bonus, it’s also beautifully read by Joshua Baker.
While working with Stephanie Grant, preparing her book Disgust: A Memoir for publication through Scuppernong Editions, I began to talk with Deonna Kelli Sayed about a short film taken from the book. Here’s the film, with music by Laurent Estoppey.
Sprout, a text/music piece created with Ben Singer and Abigail Dowd, is up at the international artzine, Cartopodes for episode 3, Eclosions. You can find it here.
Ultimate Trip has won the 2021 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Award and will be published in the 2022 issue of the North Carolina Literary Review. Ultimate Trip is part of the Mirrorbox series.
Reporting his selection for the 2021 Albright Prize, final judge Michael Parker remarks, “The second paragraph of ‘Ultimate Trip’ begins with the narrator’s declaration of love for ‘anything having to do with space, science fiction, and astronauts…’ Its real subject is the interior life, and the development of consciousness that brings us both meaning and unrivaled pleasure. ‘I’m outside myself,’ the narrator remembers after seeing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘I’ve lost hold of myself for the first time, realizing there is a self to lose hold of.’ Space, consciousness, memory, time, mystery, wonder, joy, art, faith, the body, the self—all these subjects are not only touched upon but connected in 12 pages of careful, wondrous sentences. That the essay also manages to honor, with grace, all that it cannot communicate is what convinced me of the possibilities of looking inward and upward at once.”
Altars, a short story, will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Iron Horse Literary Review.
The Edge of the Noise, a short story, has been published in Red Fez.
Peace and Noise, part of the Mirrorbox series, has been published in Entropy.
Wheel of Sleep, part of the Mirrorbox series, has been published in CRAFT Literary.
A new soundpiece, Atoll, is up at the international artzine, Cartopodes. You can find it here.
Red Fez has nominated my essay, Never Far Enough, for a Pushcart Prize.
I’m working on a series of essays titled Mirrorbox: A Life in Twelve Movies, a memoir/criticism hybrid. I’ll be providing links as the essays are published here.
Buy Cloud Diary
“At its great and generous heart, Cloud Diary, then, is a turn of the new millennium love story…Mitchell creates a love story at once engaging and unnervingly immediate. What stuns here is the unforced elegance of Mitchell’s anatomy of love, his willingness to use language unironically to capture that mysterious kinetic.”
-Joseph Dewey, North Carolina Literary Review
“A delightful and accomplished novel. Cloud Diary is a winning blend of metaphysics and box wine, of sticky-floored dive bars and lofty artistic passions. Steve Mitchell renders love and mortality with precision and without sentimentality. Nuanced and compassionate, Cloud Diary is a tribute to the ever presence of the past, and how it might help us become whole.”
-Michael Parker, The Watery Part of the World, Everything Then and Since
“With his spare, delicate sentences and poignant observations, Steve Mitchell takes us deep into his characters, and, in turn, into ourselves—into our own past loves and romantic longings. This story of Doug and Sophie is more than just the experience of being in love—it’s about the deep roots and long tendrils that love can leave for all of us. Cloud Diary is a powerful story that is both beautifully crafted and deeply felt. Holy fuck, I love this book so.”
-Frances Badgett, Contrary Magazine
“A beautiful, bittersweet novel about first love—how it forms us, how it settles in us and lingers, consoling us even to the end of our days.”
-Kim Church, Byrd
About Cloud Diary
In the world lovers create for themselves, it’s the simple images and quiet gestures that linger in memory. A silent moment together on a bench, a hand loose upon a table, a voice carried across a crowded room.
Doug is quiet and aimless when he meets Sophie, an extravagant, excitable artist. They live together on box wine, ramen and peanut butter until their world is fractured by violence. Eight years later, they rediscover each other as Sophie approaches a startling decision.
Cloud Diary is Doug’s story about Sophie and the shattering, transformative nature of intimacy. In considering the ways our histories can both scar and rescue us, it reminds us that the past is never simply the past.