Why You Should Collect Katie M. Zeigler

Welcome to the launch of our third NFT Collection, “Benny and the Heart,” a story by Katie M. Zeigler.

We discovered the writer Katie M. Zeigler during an ordinary, half-baked Google search. David was trying to find other astronauts in the literary magazine space who are publishing or minting NFTs. He landed on the home page of NiftyLit (get it?), based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of the writers and editors on the NiftyLit masthead were grads, or current students, at MFA programs across the country. In other words, it was a literary magazine. Katie M. Zeigler was the founding editor and first editor-in-chief.

I now knew that Katie was an early adopter of NFT publishing, and I also saw that she has a collection of flash fiction, The Last of the Cursive Writers, coming out this July on Flume Press. Here’s more about the book: “the eyes in this collection obsess over the hinges in our lives—the moments connecting that which came before to that which came after, employing a surreal lens through which to understand the very real.” (Farnaz Fatemi)

You can pre-order The Last of the Cursive Writers here.

When I was researching Katie’s work I read an interview where she said the following: “For my short stories and flash, I tend to primarily tell the stories of women; I’m eternally inspired by the women in my life, and have found that writing short stories is almost a way to pay homage to the heartbreak and heroism of women.” She had me at homage, heartbreak, and heroism. The h’s.

I decided to cold call, or cold e-mail, Katie and see if she had any short fiction she might want to submit to Atticus Review. When I reached out to her, she did me the immense spiritual and artistic favor of knowing who I was. (what??)  She wrote back that, “I have your piece ‘Searching for Truth by Writing Fiction’ from Lit Hub bookmarked on my computer...it was such an essential piece of motivation and clarity as I've been working on my novel. So to receive an email from you seems like serendipity in its best form.”

The deal was sealed. To top it all off, or at the root of it, is this: I fell in love with the story she sent me, “Benny and the Heart.” I want to say, “It's a hoot.” But that dates me all the way back to the 1920s, flappers, and gin mills. The entry for “hoot” in the Cambridge Online Dictionary directs you to these other idioms:

That last bit. That’s what we’re doing here with NFTs, isn’t it? New motto: Be a license to print money.

And how about our word count? “Benny and the Heart” weighs in at 7,000 words. It’s not flash fiction. It isn’t even pretending to flash anyone. We hope this inspires you to keep up with the Atticus Review submission schedule, our open reading periods, and our contests. Do you have a crazily amazing piece of writing that no one would publish because it was more than 70 words? We’re here for you.

We had the help of an assistant editor for “Benny and the Heart.” Margaret Hutton is a fantastic writer whose debut novel, If You Leave, will be published in October (Regal House Publishing). You can pre-order it here. Thank you, Margaret Hutton!

In closing, here's a Venn diagram to further convince you that today is the day to start collecting NFTs, beginning with “Benny and the Heart” by Katie M. Zeigler.

So go check out “Benny and the Heart,” a story by Katie M. Zeigler.

Boo Trundle
Editor