Category: Writing Life

Posted on

My Action Partner—A Thoughtful Witness

By Laura Sturza

While I have never birthed a human baby, I often benefit from the practices taught in birthing classes, the ones name-checked in this column—breathe, push. I spend much of my time pushing to be seen, heard, known, read, welcomed, held. I breathe between pushes, sometimes because I’m about to pass out.

Among the things that have carried me through my pushes to write, publish, read, support other writers, and teach—has been the support of having an action buddy (aka action partner). We’re both goal-oriented people, full of visions and the chops to carry them out. It happens with greater ease by having a consistent partner who serves as a reminder of our progress.

stock photo of two women with dark hair looking at a page in a journal.

Even though I have a spouse and other friends who know a lot about what I do, a daily check-in with my action buddy means having a thoughtful witness to the details of my day-to-day actions and intentions. Meanwhile, I get to see her process, victories, challenges, and moments when she needs to catch her breathe. We listen deeply, ask if the other needs particular support. 

The pandemic meant that most of us weren’t out in the world as much. It was easy to feel invisible. Yet each day, I’ve had someone watching out for me while I’m watching out for her. Our partnership helps me make mindful choices about activities concerning my writing goals, along with seemingly unrelated (yet related) tasks like hanging blackout curtains, which help me sleep better. Self-care is a recurring theme.

We correspond via email, often starting with a short check-in like “Spouse overfed the cat again. I’m furious.” or “Had a shitty night’s sleep, but hopeful anyway.”

Then, two lists. The first is the day’s action plan. I do mine in bullet points, which are so tidy and filled with hope the items will magically get completed. 

  • eat to support well-being
  • breathe, rest, take breaks
  • savor my teaching success
  • welcome health joy, yes, peace
  • meditation/prayer
  • type up notes to students and email them
  • brainstorm new story pitch
  • read
  • yoga
  • avoid multitasking
  • date with stepdaughter and her fiancé on Zoom
  • lights out at 10:15

Even the items that aren’t completed are considered achievements. They mean we weren’t only pushing. We were breathing too.

The second list celebrates what went well the day before:

Gratitudes:

  • ate to support well-being
  • health
  • Mom got her hair done
  • amazing first class, teaching!
  • lady at Starbucks
  • Tom, Zari
  • handled issue at Mom’s place with grace
  • took breaks
  • morning walk
  • the last episode of Insecure
  • progress on writing projects

Beyond corresponding with one another, we talk by phone at least once a week to enjoy a more directly interactive exchange. 

I’ve had many action buddies over the years as schedules and priorities have changed, and I’ve found them through writing groups and other social circles. We’ve had commonalities and differences, which has worked well in having someone who introduces me to new ideas and approaches.

Finally, my action buddy isn’t the only person who supports my writing and other visions. I rely on a team approach, reaching out to people when taking harder actions with texts like “hitting send on my latest story.” I also attend the WWS Saturday check-ins and stay current on our Rejection Brag. 

However, having that one consistent person has been among the ways I’ve found stability, especially during the shaky nature of the past couple of years. We serve as birthing coaches, reminding one another when to breathe, when to push.

headshot of author Laura Sturza

Laura Sturza’s writing is in The Washington Post, The LA Times, AARP’s The Girlfriend, Hippocampus, and Lunch Ticket, among others. She is completing her memoir, How I Got Married After 50 for the First Time. Laura wrote, produced, and starred in the one-woman show, Finding the Perfect Place to Live in 111 Gyrations. She recently started teaching writing to older adults. Laura lived in L.A. for 20 years and is now in Rockville, Maryland. laurasturza.com

Posted on

Breathe and Push: How a Hawk Lured Me Out of a Dark Holler into the Creative Light

by Anne Pellicciotto

Writing my secrets has always been my secret. 

I’ve scribbled away, diligently, in the margins of my life and, by now, in my fifties, I have a fully completed manuscript. Though it’s never done, is it? 

To keep the creative spark alive, over the years, I’ve taken workshops, gone away to residencies, joined critique groups, attended conferences. With the support of a writing community, and because I’ve had no choice, I kept going. I’ve written and rewritten: the very first version was a novel. I deviated to other stories, essays, blogs. I’ve always come back. 

I’ve mustered the courage to pitch to agents. I’ve gotten kind rejections. I’ve gotten silence. I’ve gotten a bite: Interesting, send it when it’s fully polished and ready to go.

It’s not ready to go; it will never be ready. 

A misty October in a holler in West Virginia.
image of a West Virginia holler by Anne Pellicciotto

Then, one misty morning this past October, in a holler, in West Virginia, that hawk swooped down and caught me in the gaze of his beady yellow eye. I stopped in my tracks. Everything became still. My heart thumped in my chest as I watched him, expanse of brown and white striated wing, sail upward.

“Simplicity and freedom,” I whispered, as he hung above me like an untethered kite.  Then a smile, the first in ages, spread across my face.  

I’d escaped DC for a much-needed break from the pandemic and political mayhem, from the helicopters circling over my neighborhood, rattling the windows in their frames, from appalling events that had yet to unfold. Over the course of my week in the woods the panic attacks subsided, my racing heart calmed, the mind-numbing headaches waned. I slept through the night. I wrote through my days. I hiked through the fields, along the brook, taking in the scent of jasmine and decaying leaves. 

Maskless, out in nature, I could breathe.

Back in Washington, I felt immediately trapped again. This suffocating feeling was not unfamiliar to me: trapped as a kid in a home with my drunken, enraged father; confined in a young marriage that was supposed to have saved me from my imploding family. 

In middle-age, in this time of Covid, I felt a bubbling urgency, once again, to escape. 

As a professional change consultant and coach, I’d spent the past six months guiding clients – business owners, artists, solopreneurs – through their pandemic pivots. In doing so, I’d navigated my own business pivot. I ported my services online and zoomed my days away like the rest of the white-collar world. My clients were inspiring: in the face of so much adversity, many made the shift from survive to thrive.

The problem was:  I wasn’t thriving. I hadn’t been since way before the pandemic. The silver lining of Covid for me, one of the lucky ones who hadn’t been inflicted directly, was that I could see my own fragility – and its polarity – my vitality.

The encounter with the hawk had woken me up to a glimmering possibility. But what was I supposed to do? What did simplicity and freedom mean? 

Initially, I took it to mean selling my house, divesting of my belongings, shuttering my business, and driving west across the country to seek out a new life. But that vision – along with a parade of real estate agents through my home of 22 years – only accentuated my fears. When I closed my eyes at night, the image of pulling away from Park Road, a car crammed with my earthly possessions, drifting around the wide-open west, untethered, ironically, did not feel like freedom. Instead, my chest felt constricted; the sleeplessness and anxiety returned. 

My therapist told me, frankly, “Anne, you’re scaring the shit out of yourself.” 

I chuckled nervously. I bit my thumb cuticle bloody. Did this mean I wasn’t ready? Ready for what?

I went back to my half-finished vision board for clues. The collage of pictures ripped from magazines and glued onto posterboard depicted serene scenes, isolated abodes with decks and Adirondack chairs facing vistas of water and mountains. A pink lotus flower bloomed out of the left upper corner with the word contemplate pasted above it.

When I really focused, I could see: the images were of me, very still, in quiet places. I had to close my eyes to access what was in the depths of my heart, a secret well-kept from even myself: I needed simplicity and freedom in my life to, shhhh, write.  

Even typing these words, revealing this truth to the page, felt like a betrayal, like something I should backspace and erase. But that admission – that writing has always been my passion – was a door, and I stood on the threshold.

My manuscript sits, weighed down by secrets. When will it be ready? When will I?

It’s time to double down on Monday Night Writing Salon, I tell myself. I’ll sign-up for a memoir class at the Writers Center. 

I blink my eyes shut and reopen them to my vision board, propped on the radiator. A calm river runs down the center, a kayak piercing the shady green water. A bluebird, not quite a hawk, drifts across a sunlit sky, song notes emanating from its beak.

I exhale a puff of exasperation, bend closer to the collage, brow crinkled. A woman in white dives into a tropical blue abyss. A hiker gazes across and open field toward the horizon with the message: Trails are merely suggestions.

The truth stares me in the face. 

The truth speaks to me in my dreams. The hawk opens its hooked beak and says I can.

 I don’t need another writing program, a swirl of busy work, a litany of applications, rejections, submissions, decisions. 

I have but one decision to make.

I don’t need a grant; I need to grant myself permission to stop zooming and go.

Writing is a story burning inside me. Writing is a decision to feed the flames.

Writing is the hawk that has reminded me, has lured me, has eyed me.

I stand at the edge of the field feeling the nudge of the breeze against my back. I take my first step through the tall grass. The ground feels firm on this path; my heart feels light. I am in motion.

The next steps are practical; this is a self-funded sabbatical. I prepare my house for rental, post an ad, field the inquiries, draw-up a lease, begin to sort through my possessions. I take another step and reserve my cabin in the woods, in the mountains, by a river, with a good desk and chair and light and air. I make those symbolic pictures real.

I have already run up against Resistance – a very familiar voice that says things like: “Well, you’re not a real writer,” and “The world doesn’t need another book,” and “Isn’t it a little late for a career change?”

This time I reply sweetly, firmly: It’s never too late to become who you are. It’s never too late to be free.

Head shot of author Anne Pellicciotti standing in front of a wide expanse of water.

Anne Pellicciotto, life coach and owner of SeeChange, writes about the crossroads in life that break and make us. Heeding the hawk’s message, she’s hit the road for a year of simplicity and freedom. In the void, Anne plans to complete Strings Attached, a #metoo coming of age memoir in which she marries her music teacher lover to save herself and, eventually, must break free from him. Follow her midlife coming of age adventures at www.seechangeconsulting.com/blog or on Medium at https://anneseye.medium.com/.

Posted on

Submissions: The Harsh Reality and How to Improve Your Odds

By Thea Pueschel

First published by Shut Up & Write  June 3, 2021

A rejection letter leaves many writers devastated. For years, I would submit one to three pieces a year to literary magazines, and if the work received a rejection, it became dead to me. My nonfiction wellness articles had a 98% acceptance rate, leading me to believe I would have no problem getting my fiction and creative nonfiction published. I did not know about the incredibly low acceptance rates of literary magazines. 

There are finite spaces to fill in the literary world, though the internet itself seems infinite. Writers hoping to be published in top-tier literary magazines are faced with startlingly low acceptance rates. According to Duotrope, The New Yorker magazine accepted only 0.14% of 1,447 unsolicited submissions received in a year. The lower-tier magazine Split Lip received 938 unsolicited submissions that same year, and only 0.11% were accepted. 

- Find & Share on GIPHY

Rejection feels personal, though it isn’t. It’s a numbers game, even with smaller publications. To prove this, I reached out to Viva Padilla, the editor-in-chief of the annual literary magazine Dryland, and asked her about the submission statistics for her publication. “The most submissions we have ever received [for a single issue] was over 1000,” she said. “Every issue has about 50-55 publishing spots available, with around 40 reserved for poetry.” I did the math. That equates to an acceptance rate of 1%-1.5% for a work of fiction. For poetry, the odds are slightly better at 5%. That’s a rejection rate of 95-99%. The acceptance rate is higher compared to Split Lip and The New Yorker, but even then most of the work is rejected due to space limitations, among other reasons.

The work Dryland publishes is primarily through open calls. Most literary magazines and journals solicit work from writers they know or those with name recognition, presenting an entry barrier to emerging or unrepresented writers. In her 2015 article for The Atlantic, acclaimed writer Joy Lanzendorfer made two interesting assertions. First, that the average published story is likely rejected 20 times before being published; second, that slush pile submissions only account for 1-2% of published work. Simply put, most of the work you see in the literary spaces is based on connection or writer recognition. Despite the rejection stats, and the reality of how many times it takes for a story to stick to a magazine’s pages, this emphasizes the importance of being an active member of the writing community. Editors solicit work from people they know. To be known you have to be an active member of the literary community.

A few years ago, I became a member of Women Who Submit (WWS), a nonprofit focused on elevating the voices of BIPOC, women, and nonbinary writers. This organization helped me see behind the literary curtain. Various members have taken time to offer me guidance and mentorship through both the submission and rejection process. WWS showcases the importance of relationships and elevating each other’s voices. The reality is that writers who know writers get published more, and all editors of literary magazines are writers themselves.

Since having my eyes opened by WWS, I have become a member of other writing communities, including Shut Up and Write. Outside of my WWS bubble, I have seen that other writers in various spaces struggle with the inevitability of rejection like I did. I hope this helps reduce the sting of rejection, and I would encourage you to submit again and again until your work finds its literary home.

Recently, I received a really nice standard rejection from Zyzzyva. The last paragraph said, “I would like to say something to make up for this ungraciousness, but the truth is we have so little space, we must return almost all the work that is submitted, including a great deal that interests us and even some pieces we admire. Inevitably, too, we make mistakes.”

I asked Christopher James, the editor-in-chief of the five-year-old Jellyfish Review, how often his magazine rejects stories they love because of lack of space. He responded, “We frequently say no to a lot of very strong stories, we would never say no to something we loved. We often accept imperfect pieces because we’ve fallen in love with them and hope our readers might fall in love with them too.” As the newer journal matures, they too may have to say no to work they admire. At the moment though, if they read your work and love it they’ll make space for it. Most journals have a limitation and only accept a certain amount of work—Jellyfish is the exception, not the rule.

Rejection is part of the process of getting your work out into the world. Should you default to younger journals? You can, but I believe that as a writer you should submit to the journals that speak to you, the magazines that you envision as a perfect fit. Familiarize yourself with the work they publish, follow their submission guidelines, and keep submitting work that aligns with their aesthetic. It will increase your chances of acceptance.

Even though stats are against them, many writers still manage to succeed, and you could be one of them. I reached out to the writers I know and asked if anyone had received multiple rejections only for a piece to be published later. Carla Sameth, author of “One Day on the Goldline: A Memoir in Essays” shared that her personal essay, “If This Is So, Why Am I?” was rejected 22 times before it was published in The Nervous Breakdown, only to be selected as notable for The Best American Essays of 2019. Just because something receives multiple rejections does not mean it isn’t worthy of recognition, accolades, or publishing. It left me wondering if those other 22 magazine editors felt they missed their window and had inevitably made a mistake.

I asked Kate Maruyama, the author of my favorite novella of 2020, “Family Solstice,” about her experience. Eighteen editors rejected her first novel “Harrowgate” before it was purchased. A short story of hers was rejected 35 times before being published. “For the short story, rejection number 10 was from Roxane Gay when she was reading for a journal,” Maruyama explained. “She said it wasn’t right for that journal but that it was a damn fine story.” Those words of encouragement along with her writing community kept Maruyama submitting.

To improve your odds and to keep a stiff upper lip when rejection inevitably finds its way to your inbox, here are some pointers to help ease the painful experience:

Take resubmission requests seriously. If a magazine rejects a written piece of yours but asks you to resubmit, they are not being nice. They don’t have time to be nice. They enjoy your work! Resubmit.

Familiarize yourself with the places you want to submit. If editors keep telling you that your work doesn’t fit their publication, read the publication. If you can’t access the publication because of monetary restrictions, look for copies in your local library or read the work of the writers who have recently been published by the magazine or journal. A Google search of the author will find other work of theirs that you can read for free. Compare their aesthetic to your own. Are you a fit? Then it’s a good place to submit!

Make sure your work is submission-ready. This is the number one sin of writers, according to Viva Padilla. Dryland doesn’t edit poetry; “…we expect poems to be ready to go,” she said. “When it comes to fiction and nonfiction that gets rejected, it’s mostly work that doesn’t seem to have a focus where we’re left wondering, what was that about?” Workshop your work with other writers and make sure to check your grammar before you submit.

Don’t expect an editor to provide feedback. If a magazine rejected you without giving a reason, pestering an editor for the “why” will quickly slam doors on future opportunities. Personalized rejections are rare. They are nice when they come in, but an editor doesn’t owe you a reason.

The reality is slush piles at literary magazines are immense, and many editors are volunteers or minimally compensated. These magazines are mostly labors of love for the written word. Rejection may seem personal, but it’s not. Even literary magazine editors get rejections from other publications. The more you submit, the greater the chance your work will find a literary home. The more time you take to prepare and research the best market for your work, the greater your odds for acceptance. Don’t be discouraged when you get a no. Look over your work and see if there are any structural or grammatical issues. If not, submit it again ASAP. If there are errors, fix them and send your piece out again.

Bottom line: it’s time to Shut Up & Submit!

Thea Pueschel is a writer, multi-media artist, and the winner of the TAEM 2020 Flash Fiction Summer Contest. Thea enjoys exploring the dark with light and the light with dark and a firm believer that without the shadow art and literature has less soul. 
Posted on

Women Who Submit at AWP Portland

a crowd of people at the AWP conference bookfair

AWP is next week, and Women Who Submit will be representing in full force! Our headquarters leaders, chapter leads, and members from around the country will be showing up in Portland for this annual conference. We are reading our poetry. We are signing our books. We are hosting dance parties. We are hosting a happy hour. We are launching our books and speaking out against the current President. We are on panels that talk about starting a literary series, submitting our work for publication, being an adopted person of color, mothering, mental illness, epistolary writing, and forbidden narratives. Just try to go one day at AWP without attending a WWS panel, reading, or reception. It’s impossible. We’re everywhere!

And if it’s your first time at AWP and you want some tips, check out our blog post from three years ago, How To Do AWP.

Continue reading “Women Who Submit at AWP Portland”

Posted on

Breathe and Push: My Humble Submission

By Hazel Kight Witham

It comes in nerve-frizzling, stomach-turning uncertainty. I scour every sentence, every phrase, triple second-guess myself. I ask my trusted readers to give me thoughts and cuts and end notes and validation before I submit.

It takes me months sometimes to craft and hone and spit-shine a piece until I deem it ready for world. I imagine the world will judge all the micro-choices, the thin premise, the overwrought vines of ideas I could not prune back. And so I draft, and revise, and put aside, pick up again, add some, cut more, trim, reorder, cut the opening, extend the ending, carve, whittle, sculpt. I workshop myself weary.

And even then, I am unsure, doubting, wondering: who will read, what will they think, is it as perfect as I can make it to be beyond reproach, likeable, no—loveable—to all. I want to engage with the world, and my people-pleasing bones make it very hard to do so without worrying what others will think of this collection of words.

My first published essay took a sizeable lifetime and an MFA program to create, excerpted from a still unpublished memoir I had spent years writing and revising. I loved that piece (“The Storm Between Us” at Bellevue Literary Review), but the work that went into chiseling it into diamond-sharp focus was months and months in the making.

a collection of notebooks with handwriting

I wonder if the chiseling was my worry. It was hard stone to handle. All the revising was procrastination of a sort. It was nerve-wracking offering this story to the world: a braided piece about the DNA I inherited from my grandmother, her hospitalization in Galveston, a dip back into the hurricane history of that seaside town that mirrored the storm of mental illness that threatened to crush us both.

When I told my father that I was writing about my own hospitalization a decade after the hell of it he said, “Why? Why would people want to read about that?” I want to say that he was trying to protect me, this man who talks about everything but the stories I most want to hear. I want to say he was not saying my story does not matter. That he was trying to shield me from criticism perhaps, or a lack of regard. I want to be generous in the face of his disregard.

But his question echoes across the years still. Even though I know now and knew then that my story matters—our stories matter—and are worth being well-told. Worth something not just to the heart of the listener or reader, but to the heart of the teller, the writer.

And yet. The question still dogs me as I try to help manuscripts years in the making find the light. As I become the advocate for my own story because sometimes your queries go unanswered, and emails from contests all start in apology and sometimes the agent shops a work and there are no bites and they quit the literary world for another one a bit more kind.

Still: I am learning to breathe and push the work out. I am learning to submit. Poems are easiest, bite-sized, not so demanding of working and reworking that prose and longer works require. Perhaps not so vulnerable to judgment. But still there are those jitters when I know a piece will go up, and someone might read it, maybe even my father, and I do not know how or if it will be received. I do not know what I am blind to in my own work, what I say that might offend. I do not know if you are even here with me still, holding on to the end, giving this a few minutes of your precious time.

There are many worthy words out there, and claiming space for my own is part of the writing life I have the hardest time with. But the words are worth it. And so: to submit is the precise word for this process. I submit despite the fear, I submit despite certain rejection, I submit despite the echoes of my father and the self-doubt and the uncertainty. I submit, I submit, I submit and every time, there is less apology and more clarity.

Hazel Kight Witham is a writer, teacher, activist, and artist whose work can be found in Bellevue Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Rising Phoenix Review, Angels Flight, Sixfold, Zoetic Press’s NonBinary Review, Lunch Ticket and Lady/Liberty/Lit. She lives and breathes in Los Angeles with her family. www.hazelkightwitham.com

Posted on

Six Rules to Write on a Budget

By Lisbeth Coiman

Taking the first steps into writing demands an immediate assessment of your finances. The cost of regularly submitting work for publication, attending conferences, or workshops, subscribing to publications, supplies, and other unforeseen expenses consume the usually limited resources of an unprepared emergent writer. Even those who live on writing have to approach their job with a thrifty mentality. Organization and careful planning are the fundamentals principles of writing on a budget.

1. Track every penny

I start my year with an expense tracker on an excel sheet. If your income this year barely makes it above poverty level, be thrifty and watch every penny. If you decide to report your writing as a business, it is mandatory that both income and expenses be carefully recorded for tax purposes. A spreadsheet is easy to prepare and must include mileage, supplies, gasoline, submissions, memberships, subscriptions, and can even cover charge to attend poetry readings. For a complete list of tax deductible items for writers see. Here is another. Continue reading “Six Rules to Write on a Budget”

Posted on

How to Do AWP

Screenshot of the exhibition room map at AWP 2016, focused on the location of the Women Who Submit table

Please excuse this repost from March 23, 2016 as we are traveling to DC at this moment, but we felt this article can still be helpful to those nervous about how to do AWP “right.” Be sure to visit WWS at booth 975 for “I submitted!” buttons and a chance to win a free WWS tote filled with goodies. And you can find all three WWS cofounders–Ashaki M. Jackson, Alyss Dixson and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo–at the Submission as Action panel 9am Thursday, along with Kundiman’s Cathy Linh Che and moderator, Desiree Zamorano. 

For more panels and events with WWS members check out our WWS at AWP17 guide.

By Lauren Eggert-Crowe

I had no idea how to explain where I was going. “It’s this conference in Baltimore,” I told my professors when I explained why I’d be missing class. “It’s for writers, or something.” All I knew was that it was called AWP and that my creative writing professor would be presenting a panel on imaginative teaching methods. She suggested I check it out, and that’s how I ended up driving six hours from Western Pennsylvania to Baltimore one grey Wednesday evening in February, 2003. Continue reading “How to Do AWP”

Posted on

A Tax Primer for Writers

by Michelle Joy Lander

“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.” -Herman Wouk

Writers and artists are notoriously right brained. While this allows for creativity, flights of imagination and pure magic, it can be a hindrance when it comes to more practical matters. Such as income taxes.

It wasn’t until I attended a workshop on finances and taxes offered by the Writers Guild of America, West that I learned the scope of deductions available to writers. The average tax preparer is not well versed in these and there are misconceptions as to what constitutes a “business” versus a “hobby.” If your objective is to make your living as a writer, you are a professional writer. Even if you also work slinging hash, teaching or performing brain surgery.

Continue reading “A Tax Primer for Writers”

Posted on

What do you do?

A small, long pub with 9 people with laptops sitting at the bar, a woman sitting at a table with her back to them, chalkboard menus in the background

by Lauren Eggert-Crowe

I’m never quite sure how to answer the question, “What do you do?” There are a few answers, depending on who’s asking. I’m an executive assistant at a Jewish anti-hunger nonprofit. This is where I spend the majority of my time and what takes up most of my brainspace. I’m also a writer, but I don’t write as often as I’d like to. My work in the literary community is often heavy on the social aspect. I support my friends at literary events. I organize readings and Women Who Submit submission parties. I forge connections and put in the effort to build community.

I started this job at the very beginning of the second Obama administration. Over the years I’ve sometimes found it difficult to marry the two halves of my life. I spend my weeks assisting the operations of a non-profit and spend my evenings and weekends trafficking in book talk, fielding 10-25 reading invites a week. I listen to author talks, I donate money to the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, I read my friends’ books and I promote their successes on social media.

Two things happened to me this year that re-aligned my perspective on both my paid career and my unpaid career. The first was personal. The second was global. Continue reading “What do you do?”

Posted on

Behind The Editor’s Desk: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is the Editor-in-Chief of The Offing, an online literary magazine that began as a channel of Los Angeles Review of Books. As described on the site, “The Offing is an online literary magazine publishing creative writing in all genres and art in all media. The Offing publishes work that challenges, experiments, provokes — work that pushes literary and artistic forms and conventions. The Offing is a place for new and emerging writers to test their voices, and for established writers to test their limits.”

I spoke with Dr. Prescod-Weinstein about being an editor, and the future of The Offing.

As an editor, what do you look for in submitted work? What separates good submissions from really stand-out ones?

I am always looking for works that give me the feeling that I will be thinking about them for a long time to come. I should caveat this by saying that the department editors make almost all of the publication decisions, although occasionally I will be asked what I think about a potential piece. I want us to publish work that is unfamiliar but captivating. I want it to keep crossing my mind hours, weeks and months later. For example, Scarlett Ji Yeon Kim’s from the Koreana Cycle is a bilingual series that experiments with form in both English and Korean.  Months after we published it, I’m still returning to it because it speaks to me as a third culture kid. I’ve also been drawn repeatedly to Khadijah Queen’s I HAVE QUESTIONS, which is a deeply personal and provocative think piece in verse about constructing a world without anti-Black police violence. Continue reading “Behind The Editor’s Desk: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein”