Author: womenwhosubmitlit

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Learning Your Audience: The Benefits of Submitting to Literary Journals, Grants, and Residencies (Even If You Don’t Get In!)

by Rachael Warecki

Two years ago, I decided I needed to focus my submission process. I’d received acceptances from some wonderful journals, but I’m ambitious as hell and I wanted to take my writing and submission goals to the next level. Around the same time, I also decided to apply for grants and residencies, so I started to target my submissions and applications more strategically.

As I’ve written previously, this approach has had some success, mostly in the form of personal rejections. But the editorial notes and feedback have given me more than just warm, fuzzy feelings of validation—they’ve given me a better sense of my most receptive audience. In the two years since I decided to submit more strategically, I’ve discovered that my writing seems to appeal mostly to editors and directors who are women. The judges and editors who’ve written me the warmest rejections have identified as women or represented women-centric organizations, or both.

Continue reading “Learning Your Audience: The Benefits of Submitting to Literary Journals, Grants, and Residencies (Even If You Don’t Get In!)”

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The Long and Winding Road of Not Having All Your Eggs in One Basket

by Diane Sherlock

While working on my MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles, I started my fourth novel, Wrestling Alligators. My primary mentors for the book were Rob Roberge (Liar: A Memoir, Crown 2016) and Gayle Brandeis (Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, HaperOne 2004). I finished a first draft for my thesis project in May, 2009, and continued to polish it to the point where I was confident about sending it out to agents. At the time, my daughter was an assistant to a lit agent in Hollywood, and he read it and recommended an editor he’s worked with for many years. I sent it to her and she peppered me with hard questions about the material, pointing out that some of the imagery was in conflict. She was pessimistic about my solving those problems. That lit a fire under my inner “I’ll show you!” She recommended a big reorganization of the material, which ended up serving the book well. I walked a lot of miles in the hills near my place to figure out answers to her hardest questions and after a few weeks, I solved them. It was one of the best breakthroughs I’ve had. Even so, the Hollywood lit agent passed.

Undeterred, in no small part because I’d been through a lot of rejection with screenplays in Hollywood, I sent it out to about 100 agents. For the few agents who requested exclusivity, I set a time limit of 2-4 weeks, nothing open-ended. Mostly, I contacted dozens of agents at a time with simultaneous submissions. I received many requests for pages and many compliments about those pages. One agreed to represent me if I could get a publisher on board. This was sounding a lot like Hollywood: do the hard work, and we’ll close the deal for you.  Continue reading “The Long and Winding Road of Not Having All Your Eggs in One Basket”

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How and Why To Hang In There When Rejection Gets You Down

by Toni Ann Johnson

When Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo (WWS Cofounder and blog manager) posted on the private Women Who Submit Facebook page a couple of weeks ago asking if we wanted to do a monthly rejection brag, I shuddered. Boast about my failures? Uh, pass.

Well. Then I got an acceptance on a short story after 3 years and 56, yes 56 effin’ rejections. And I guess I did brag about it, though it’s not the rejections I was proud of; it was the fortitude.

So here I am, the oft rejected and ashamed (until I’m not) submitter, here to offer encouragement about why you should remain persistent, too.

Continue reading “How and Why To Hang In There When Rejection Gets You Down”

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A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR MAY

A laptop computer with an article titled "Submissions Made Simple" on the screen and a stack of literary journals sits on top of the laptop base, titles facing out

Spring has sprung and with it has come a new crop of publishing successes for WWS members. Here is a brief look at the work published and awards won this month.

From Carla Sameth‘s “Feed Me, Fund Me, Leave Me Alone” on Brain,Child:

From age 8-12, boys go from puppy dogs to war video games to Beyonce. The transition is a collage, what you see decorating their walls; Tupac, Bob Marley and Martin Luther King are on my son’s walls too. When Raphael was 12, we went to Israel for a wedding and a pre-Bar Mitzvah trip. Jerusalem was oppressive with its over-arching trifecta of religious intrusiveness. But leaving for Tel Aviv, Raphael spied the olive skinned Sabras wearing bikinis and Uzis and said, “Now, we’re talking!”

From Carla‘s “Letting Go” on Full Grown People:

Raphael looks directly at me from what seems like an insurmountable distance across the tight rope. He stands still for a moment, balanced. “Mom, I’m okay. You need to just think about yourself now,” he says.

Congratulations to Rachel Warecki whose story “Something Blue” was shortlisted for the Masters Review Volume V anthology. Amy Hempel will select the ten winning stories for publication.  Continue reading “A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR MAY”

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Writing English as a Polyglot

by Hong-My Basrai

When we finally left communist Vietnam, my father said: “Never look back.” His words had a finality to them. They stuck in my twenty-two-year-old mind, and so I began my never looking back process, starting with learning to communicate predominantly in English.

The acquisition and manipulation of languages were second nature to me. I had been doing it all my life—soaking up Vietnamese in the cradle, French in kindergarten, Chinese from classmates, English to survive, and Gujarati because I had married into a Gujarati Indian family.

Basic English had come to me easily enough. It was just a small step from uttering my first “thank you” to verbal fluency, then progressing fast from ESL writing class to English 1A composition. What was harder was learning to elevate my writing proficiency to a level suitable for a public audience. Since I had picked up English on the go, learning it by imitation, like a baby, with most words borrowed from my prior knowledge of French, I had to pay extra attention to spelling of similar words, particularly homophones like address and adresse, envelope and enveloppe, May and mai; false cognates, words that have similar spelling but different meanings, like infant and enfant, anniversary and anniversaire, song and son; and words of Latin and Greek roots like destroy and détruire, or abnormal and anormal, etc.  Continue reading “Writing English as a Polyglot”

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Claiming a Corner of Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own”

by Cassandra Lane

“The thesis of A Room of One’s Own—women must have money and privacy in order to write with genius—is inevitably connected to questions of class,” Mary Gordon wrote in a 1981 forward to the book that comprises Virginia Woolf’s famous extended essay.

I read the book in early 2001, highlighting Woolf’s self-assured sentences in bright orange ink and writing in the margins with fervent scrawls. As an African-American woman who grew up poor yet still believed I had stories to tell, a voice that needed to be shared, and who desired, more than anything, to tell stories with brilliance, I certainly took issue with parts of Woolf’s argument. Whereas she insisted that one write calmly and without bringing attention to the self, my heart raged against social injustice; I wrote in first person. I was not wealthy or emotionally detached enough to be the kind of writer she described.  Continue reading “Claiming a Corner of Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own””

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7 Practical tips for Writer Mamas

by Kate Maruyama

I’m a second generation writer mama. My mom raised 3 kids and 30 books, and it wasn’t a goal in life, but I ended up being a writer also. Same with having kids: it wasn’t a goal in life, but here I am, and not unhappily so. When writing is something at the heart of your existence, something you have to do, and you have kids, it’s a scramble, but you somehow make it work.

Don’t get me wrong. I twinge with jealousy when I read write-ups of enormously successful writing men who, with kids or not, have a little less interference. I remember an entire article about the very prolific, fantastic writer Haruki Murakami who spoke rhapsodically of his uninterrupted writing day wherein he exercised for three hours, had the space to be alone and think for several hours and wrote for eight hours straight. He glibly talks about giving yourself, the writer, time to think, to dream. He cautions new writers to keep things quiet.

Quiet! Ha. Continue reading “7 Practical tips for Writer Mamas”

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May Submission Deadlines: 9 under $15

By Lisbeth Coiman

Here is our submission call list for May. Today I bring you five deadlines and five open calls all but one under $15. Polish your piece, submit, and track. Find support in your community to celebrate each other’s success, but make time to hold your writing buddies through rejections. Keep writing. Submit hard.

 1.Gloom Cupboard

Deadline: May 15, 2016

Submission Guidelines: 

http://gloomcupboard.com/https://gloomcupboard.com/submission-guidelines/ 

Reading fee: $3 Continue reading “May Submission Deadlines: 9 under $15”

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Shine Brightly: On Literary Citizenship and Class

by Stephanie Abraham

Acting as a good literary citizen means participating in and taking responsibility for our literary communities. As writers, this means that in addition to promoting our own work, we share work by writers we admire; attend readings at independent bookstores; buy books written by local authors and look for opportunities to mentor. For most of us, literary citizenship is an extension of our everyday lives. It’s important to acknowledge the following three points, however, which often get left out of the conversation:

Community matters – and so do you.

Continue reading “Shine Brightly: On Literary Citizenship and Class”

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A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR APRIL

A laptop computer with an article titled "Submissions Made Simple" on the screen and a stack of literary journals sits on top of the laptop base, titles facing out

April goes on record as the top month of the year thus far for WWS members receiving acceptances. The list is sure to inspire! Here is a brief look at the work published and awards won this month.

From Melissa Chadburn‘s “Who Gets to Break the Rules in America” on Jezebel:

Foster care, two weeks—that’s all I thought I was signed up for. But I wound up living in group homes and various foster placements throughout Los Angeles for the next four years. I call this portion of my adolescence The Time of The Rules.

Continue reading “A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR APRIL”