Tag: poetry

September Submission Bonanza Challenge!

Jaclyn13 Comments

September is here, folks and that means it’s time to celebrate Labor Day by expending a bit of my labor on my writing career.  All this month, I will be working on my second Submission Bonanza!

In my first Submission Bonanza! I racked up a few rejections, got some things published (more info to come on some of those things as the publications come out!), and learned a whole lot.  It was incredibly successful in more than just my initial idea that I would start racking up the rejections to get my work out there.  I am reading more critically and closely.  I found lots of new magazines.  I feel part of a larger literary conversation.  I am inspired to write more.  Also, I am inspired to keep up with submitting and submit more.

Like last time, I will be working on submitting to 30 magazines in a month.  I have my pieces picked out and edited.  I have a list of magazines that I want to submit to. And I have a cover letter and bio template ready to go.

Feel free to join me in this journey.  I loved doing this in July and I am excited about all the magazines opening their doors to submissions this month.  I would highly recommend that anyone who is wanting to grow and develop as a writer think about doing this in some form.  Maybe you don’t want to do one magazine every day.  Maybe you want to do one every other day, one a week, or even just one.  Maybe you want to do three a week or three a day.  Whatever the case may be, set a reasonable goal or yourself and get going.  Your work isn’t going to read itself.  If you do decide to join, please let me know.  I would love to be able to support and encourage each other as the months go on.  Good luck!

Sharing: “And Your Soul Shall Dance” by Garrett Kaoru Hongo

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And Your Soul Shall Dance

 

Walking to school beside fields

of tomatoes and summer squash,

alone and humming a Japanese love song,

you’ve concealed a copy of Photoplay

between your algebra and English texts.

Your knee socks, saddle shoes, plaid dress,

and blouse, long-sleeved and white

with ruffles down the front,

come from a Sears catalogue

and neatly compliment your new Toni curls.

All of this sets you apart from the landscape:

flat valley grooved with irrigation ditches,

a tractor grinding through alkaline earth,

the short stands of windbreak eucalyptus

shuttering the desert wind

from a small cluster of wooden shacks

where your mother hangs the wash.

You want to go somewhere.

Somewhere far away from all that dust

and sorting machines and acres of lettuce.

Someplace where you might be kissed

by someone with smooth, artistic hands.

When you turn into the schoolyard,

the flagpole gleams like a knife blade in the sun,

and classmates scatter like chickens,

shooed by the storm brooding on your horizon.

 

Garrett Kaoru Hongo (1982, p.69)

6 Tips for Perfect (Professional) Cover Letters for Literary Magazines

Jaclyn21 Comments

By now, if you’ve been following my Submission Bonanza! series, you should have picked the pieces you want to send to magazines and compiled a list of magazines that you want to submit to.  It’s time now to write a cover letter to send along with your submissions.  As Michael Nye, Editor of the Missouri Review says, sending a cover letter with your submission is “like wearing a suit to an interview.”  Don’t let your submissions to literary magazines show up naked!

It’s easy to feel stressed about this part of the process of submitting to literary magazines: the cover letter  (duh-duh dun….).  It’s understandable because this can be the first impression that you are giving to the editors of the magazine.  We definitely want to put our best foot forward and present ourselves as professional, competent writers.

But also, keep in mind that you are not being judged on your cover letter.  Editors want solid writing.  So make a nice, neat little cover letter and spend the majority of your time stressing about whether you should put that extra comma in your new creative nonfiction piece.

So here are some things to think about when writing a cover letter:

1.  Follow the guidelines of the literary magazine.

This seems self-explanatory, but a lot of literary magazines ask for different kinds of information in the cover letter.  Some of them want word counts or genre.  Others want a short bio about you.  Some even ask for no cover letter at all.  If you are submitting simultaneously, you’ll also need to note that.  Make sure you follow their specific guidelines.

 

2. Address the letter to a person.

This is not a “To Whom It May Concern” letter.  It’s pretty easy to find most of the staff at a literary magazine under their masthead.  Some magazines even tell you in the submission guidelines who to address it to.  Be as specific as possible.  If you’re submitting poetry, address it directly to Ms. Sally B. Poetryeditor.  If you can’t pinpoint a specific name, you can address it to the editor.

 

3. Keep it short and simple. 

Don’t forget, a lot of editors are reading hundreds or thousands of these.  This is not a query letter, so you don’t need to describe your piece to them.  You don’t need to tell them how you came up with the idea or list the twenty-seven other literary magazines you’ve been in.  For example, the Colorado Review suggests this cover letter:

Dear Editor,

Enclosed is my [fiction/nonfiction/poetry] submission “Title of Manuscript.” Thank you for considering it for publication in Colorado Review.

[*If submitting via mail] I’ve included an SASE for [response only/the return of my manuscript].

Your Name

Full Contact Info

 

 4. Keep it professional.

Naturally, you want to make sure that the grammar and punctuation are flawless and that it is in a professional format.  But also, you don’t need to be cute or catchy to get the editor’s attention.  Let your writing do that.  That’s what they are looking for.

 

5. Add a short bio (Optional).

Some magazines ask for a short bio or you may feel that it’s in your best interest to include one.  This should only be a line or two of relevant information. Don’t tell your life story, just one or two tidbits that are interesting or pertinent.  Don’t include a whole list of the hundreds of places you’ve been published.  Just pick 3-5.  Also, if you haven’t been published, don’t be ashamed to include that too.  As Nye suggests:

If you’ve never been published before? Say so. “If accepted, this would be my first published story.” All literary magazines love being the one to publish a writer for the first time, so acknowledging this possibility can only help.

 

 6. Add a note about what you read in the magazine or how you know the magazine (Also optional).

If you want to personalize it a bit for the magazine, some editors might like to know that you did actually take the time to read past issues or that you have had past correspondences with them.  But again, this step could be optional.

 

In the end, I really like this bit Nye’s advice really calmed me down:

A professional cover letter is all we ask, and even minus that, if the work is excellent, we don’t really care. We want to publish the best work we read, regardless of whether or not you’re an emerging writer or an established one.

So don’t stress too much about your cover letter.  Get it done, and make it professional, so you can get back to your craft.

 

So, the goal for this week:

Make a template of your cover letter and bio.  Have them ready and at hand when you want to submit.  I personally made a template that had all the information I could possibly want to send to and editor (word counts, genres, bio, etc) and then cut or edited from that for each literary magazine.  Once this work is out of the way, you’ll be nearly set to start submitting!

 

Need more help?

You can read Michael Nye’s article on The Art of the Literary Magazine Cover Letter.

You could also look at advice about what not to do by Michael Kardos at Writer’s Digest. 

Or take a look at this sample cover letter from The Review Review.

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 2: Finding Literary Magazines

Jaclyn17 Comments

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 2: Finding LitMags

One of the lessons that really hit home during my Submission Bonanza! was that I need to be more choosy about the literary magazines that I submit to.    Now that I have a few acceptances under my belt, I realize that I may have sold myself short in my submission process.  Before starting this challenge, I was just excited to have my work ‘out there.’  And in some ways I still am.  But after my first acceptance, when I had to contact all the other magazines I had submitted to and ask them to withdraw the submission that was accepted, well… I was kind of sad to be withdrawing some of those.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to get acceptances and I’m looking forward to seeing the publications, but next time around, I will be a little more thoughtful in choosing which literary magazines I submit to.  Many magazines are looking for unpublished pieces so that they can have first time rights and once you give those away, it’s much more difficult to find places that will want to publish a piece.

Here are some general things to think about when looking for magazines:*

Do you want to get paid?

My own Submission Bonanza! challenge started as a labor of love and I wasn’t at all thinking about getting paid.  But now that I have racked up some acceptances, I’m a little more keen to be compensated for my work.  A lot of magazines offer contributors copies as payment.  Others offer a small, token payment of $5-20 USD.  Still others pay by word, line, or page.  One of my favorite payment systems is automatic consideration in a contest, which means the chance of a bigger monetary prize and a contest to put on your CV, in addition to publication.

 Are you willing to pay to submit to magazines?

A lot of magazines that I found asked for a small ($2-3 USD) reading fee if you submitted online.  This means that you don’t have to spend the time/money to print your pieces, get envelopes, and pay for postage for your submission and your SASE for the response.  This could be a reasonable trade-off, especially if you are looking to get paid, or if you are submitting to magazines abroad.  If you do a month-long Submission Bonanza!  at the end of the month you will have spent about $90 USD and have 30 chances to get paid and published.  On the other hand, there are plenty of magazines out there that don’t charge a reading fee, even some that compensate writers, so you just need to decide what you are comfortable with.

 Do you want to be in print or online?

There’s something really satisfying about seeing your work and your name in print.  A lot of print magazines have years of prestige and awards behind them.  But, as brightonsauce said, there are very few people reading print literary magazines these days.  Perhaps you could reach a bigger audience with a small online magazine than you could with a small print magazine.  There are also a lot of litmags out there that have both print and online editions.  This is just something to give some thought to as you look for magazines.

What kind of rights are you willing to give up?

I am not a copyright lawyer, so I am not going to try to explain the legalities of the different kinds of publications rights.  But, I will direct you to this article and this article, both of which I found useful when I started thinking about publication rights.  What’s on your blog seems to be a little bit of a gray area.  I found magazines that specifically said personal blogs counted as being previously published and also found magazines that said that this kind of publication was not considered by them to be previously published.  Just to be safe, I took down the pieces I was submitting from my blog, but it was something I had to wrestle with a bit.

Are you submitting online or by mail?

I was fortunate enough to do my Submission Bonanza! from a tiny island in the Caribbean that did not have a post office.  So, this made this particular decision quite easy for me.  A lot of literary magazines that I found charged a fee for electronic submissions but not snail mail submissions.  I also found quite a few that no longer accepted submissions by post.  Just something to consider as you search.

Do you want to submit this piece to other magazines?

Luckily for us writers, most of the literary magazines that I looked at accepted simultaneous submissions, which means you can submit that piece to other magazines as you wait to hear back from them.  If you plan on submitting your work to more than one magazine at a time (which I highly recommend!) make sure that they all accept simultaneous submissions.

There are a lot of tools out there to help writers find magazines that they can submit to.  One of the most popular is Duotrope.  You can currently use their free trial to give it a go, but they have recently gone to a paid subscription service.  It’s $50 USD per year and helps you keep track of deadlines and submissions, so a lot of writers find it invaluable.

If you don’t have the funds to invest in Duotrope, never fear!  There are lots of resources out there for writers who are looking for markets to be published in.  The one I’ve personally used the most is Poets & Writers, which has a free search function where you can search by payment type, genre, or format of the magazine.  (This one is also recommended by Mary MacAvoy.)

You can also take a look at The Submission Grinder, which is another one of my favorites.  The platform is still in Beta mode, but their database is growing rapidly and they are quickly becoming a good, free alternative to Duotrope.  This one is easily searchable using lots of different criteria, so it’s incredibly useful.  One drawback is that it only looks at magazines that accept fiction, so if you’re looking to submit nonfiction or poetry, you could still use it (since a lot of literary magazines accept multiple genres) but you’ll have to do a little more research to weed out the magazines that accept your genre.  (And Rachel K. Jones finds this one useful, too.)

There are also lots of lists of magazines.  For example, I personally was interested in magazines that were affiliated with Writing M.F.A. Programs, so I used this list.  Maybe you want to be in a Top 50 magazine, so you could use this list.  Perhaps you know you want to submit electronically, so you could use this list.  If you’re looking for magazines that are particularly edgy, you could look here.  Maybe you just want a giant resource of lots of magazines, so you could look here or here.  I personally was looking for magazines that accepted online submissions, did not charge a reading fee, accepted simultaneous submissions, and were reading in the summer months, sothis is the list I came up with.

Goal for this week:

Compile a list of magazines (I would recommend double the number you are planning to submit to) as possible candidates to submit your work to.

*More info on how to match your specific pieces to magazines will be coming in a future post.  For now, keep your eye out for magazines that publish the genre of pieces you have, match your criteria from the questions above, and that you like the feel of.

Sharing: “Dark August” by Derek Walcott

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Dark August

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won’t come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,

she does not come out.
Don’t you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly

to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,

so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,

all will not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then

I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
The black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you.

Derek Walcott

Call for Submissions: smoking glue gun

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In my search for litmags, I came across this funky little gem and really loved the feel of it.  I wanted to pass it on to all of you:

 

SMOKING GLUE GUN IS ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS

we approach, handle & care for poems as pieces of art.

we publish work that is fresh &/or human, flashy &/or subtle.

we accept original/unpublished submissions in all forms: text, sound, video, image, hybrid, etc.

please submit 4-8 pieces (video under 10 minutes) through submishmash once during each reading period.

(accepted formats include .doc, .docx, pdf, jpeg, audio/video able to be played in itunes).

all rights revert to the author[s] &/or artist[s] upon publication, though we do ask that smoking glue gun is acknowledged as the original publisher if subsequently published. we accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces

Jaclyn15 Comments

Submission Bonanza!

How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces

It feels like a big decision:  when is a piece done?  We all want our work to be ‘perfect.’  Naturally, we want to put our best foot forward and make sure that anything we submit is the very best it can be.  But don’t forget, this challenge started with one of The Copybot’s 100 Ways to Become a Better Writer: #66 Rack up Rejections.  You can’t wait until you know that a piece will be accepted to submit it.  You need to submit it first to find out.  Even the very act of submitting, whether they are accepted or not, will make you grow and learn and develop as a writer.

Of course, you want to send out solid, professional pieces.  Make sure you are submitting work that you are proud to attach your name to.  Ask yourself, if this comes out in print, would you share it with people?  Would you be proud to have your name in the byline?  To me, this is the most important criteria.

I personally am a big believer in the idea that if you wait for perfection, nothing you write is ever going to make it out the door.  No piece is ever really finished.  Your ideas about each piece of writing that you create will grow and change, just as you do.  You can always look at your work from new, fresh, different perspectives.  Some pieces will look good to you one year and like garbage the next.  And it’s really a doozy to try to predict what will appeal to different readers or editors at different magazines.  So pick pieces that you like, right now.  Chances are that if you like them, others out there will too.

Your work doesn’t need to be perfect to be out in the world.  Obviously, it’s important when polishing work to think about details.  But there is a difference between meaningful details and minutiae.  I personally spent days wondering if I should put one space or two between lines in a particular poem I was sending out.  Finally, I had to admit to myself that if an editor liked it, they liked it and if they didn’t, an extra space wasn’t going to change their mind.  No editor was going to pour over this poem for days the way I was.  They just don’t have time for that.

So I think of it as a process of polishing.  Your bits of creativity are diamonds.  Maybe they start as diamonds in the rough, so of course they need to be polished.  You want them to shine and shimmer and be as clear and beautiful as possible.  But if you sit there polishing them for years, they will wear away until there is no diamond left.  It will become just a pile of dust that you can’t sell or use or share with other people.  Or worse, you’ll have a nice little diamond sitting in your desk drawer collecting dust instead of sparkling.  Diamonds need to reflect light in order to shine, and so does your writing.  It’s not going to shimmer in the darkness of your desk drawer/computer hard drive/recesses of your brain.  It needs to be out in the sunlight. So, by all means, polish your diamonds.  It’s necessary.  But don’t chip away at them until there’s nothing left and don’t let them sit in darkness unable to sparkle.

To me, the easiest way to think about these decisions is to realize that in the end, it’s not my decision if something is ready to be published in a particular literary magazine.  I only have to decide if I would be proud to see this piece, with my name on it, in print.  If I would, I’m sending it out and the readers and editors at the various literary magazines that I’m submitting it to can decide if it’s ‘perfect’ enough to print in their publication.  Do you want this piece published?  If you do, then send it out.

Perhaps the most practical reason to submit something that might not be quite ‘perfect’ in your eyes is that you might get feedback on it.  Last year I submitted to Flash Frontier and got a lovely letter back saying they liked the piece, but suggesting ways that I could make it more solid and clearer.   (You can see the before and after pieces.) It was invaluable advice.  I took the advice and it did polish that tiny diamond I had.  And, they ended up publishing it.  I found that many of the literary magazines I looked at offered to give writers feedback, if you asked for it and were willing to wait a little longer for a response.  Some venues (like Hoot Review) even have scheduled workshops and are willing to work with you on a piece before you even submit it.

One more thing I’ve had a lot of comments about from people out there is that they don’t have enough pieces or work finished to do this challenge.  Many literary magazines are happy to accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send your piece to more than one litmag at a time.  You could send just your favorite piece to 30 different magazines all at the same time.  So, if you have just one poem or one book review or one flash fiction piece, you have enough to do the 30 day challenge.

Organizing:

I personally chose about 15 of my strongest pieces, gave them a little polish-up and made sure they were ready to go out into the world.  Once I knew which pieces I was ready to submit, I made a handy little spreadsheet so that I could keep track of what I submitted to where and when (see below).  This is incredibly important because when your pieces get accepted (yes, when, not if) you may need to withdraw them from other magazines.  One of the pieces of info that I knew I needed was word count because I planned to submit some flash fiction, and I listed that below the title of each piece.  This spreadsheet  is also how I kept track of my responses.  You can see in this image that Camroc Review sent me my first rejection (in pink), so then I knew that those pieces could be sent out to even more places or maybe that they needed more polishing.  At the bottom of this spreadsheet, which you can’t see, is a total of how many times I submitted each piece, just a sum of all the 1’s I input to show that something had been submitted.  It’s a really good idea to make this spreadsheet now so that you don’t have to do it while you are doing the work of submitting later on.  You don’t need to know the litmags just yet, we’ll take care of those next week.

 

 

So, this is the goal for this week: collect one, a few, twenty pieces of writing that you like.  Polish them (gently!) until you would be proud to see them published.  Get yourself organized so that you keep track of your little diamonds, whether you are using Duotrope, a notebook, a dry erase scoreboard, or a little spreadsheet like mine.  And get ready to rack up rejections – and probably some acceptances too!

 

 

 

P.S. Thank you to everyone for the comments and suggestions.  Definitely keep the questions coming and feel free to suggest issues that you want to see addressed.  I’ll do my best to respond to all of these.  Keep in mind also that I’m learning as I go too, so your knowledge and experience is appreciated as well!

 

Sharing:”Bluebird” by Charles Bukowski

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmWZOsVtqR0&w=420&h=315]

Bluebird

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

 

 

 

From Charles Bukowski’s book “The Last Night of Earth Poems”

(c) Charles Bukowski

30 Litmags in 30 Days: Create Your Own Submission Bonanza!

Jaclyn72 Comments

I did it! I completed my self-imposed challenge, Submission Bonanza!  During the month of July, I submitted poetry, creative nonfiction, short stories, and flash fiction to 30 litmags.  I’m not going to lie, it took work and it took time.  After so many years not submitting any work and not focusing on my writing, this was definitely a challenge for me.  But I can certainly say it was well worth it.  I would highly recommend that anyone looking to grow as a writer think about setting their own Submission Bonanza!   I’ve grown and learned so many things over the past month and I am excited to share them all with you.

You can see my halfway post, Notches on the Bedpost, to see some of the benefits I’ve gained and ways I’ve been developing by doing this exercise.  There are so many ways in which I have grown.  I’ve become a better reader. I’ve started editing more seriously.  I’ve learned so much more about contemporary writers and writing.  I feel like I am getting familiar with literary magazines in way I wasn’t before.  Most importantly, I’ve been motivated to write more than I ever have before.

Also (spoiler alert!) I have received a few replies already and it’s not just rejections I am racking up.

Because I felt like this exercise was so successful in my growth and motivation as a writer, I am planning on doing it again for the month of September and I would love for anyone who is interested to join me.

All this month, I will be posting a practical guide on how to create your own Submission Bonanza! Once you lay the groundwork (finding magazines, choosing your pieces, writing your cover letter) this month, you will be ready by September 1st to start submitting to the many, many litmags which will be opening their mailboxes for submissions.

After I did the prep work of looking for magazines, editing my work, and writing a template of my cover letter and bio, it took me about an hour to submit to each magazine.  Decide for yourself a reasonable goal for your Submission Bonanza!  I am fortunate to have an hour a day to submit to magazines and also still have time for my writing.  What kind of time can you make for it?  Can you do an hour a week?  Three hours a week?  An hour a day? Three hours a day?  You want to challenge yourself, sure.  But you also want to make a Submission Bonanza!  that you can stick to.

I am really excited about doing this again and getting into gear for another flurry of submissions.  If you’re excited too, let me know!  I would love to share lessons learned, tricks and things to consider, and just general motivation and support with anyone who’s game!