No more excuses. It’s time to send our work out!
Yes, yes, we know why you didn’t submit your writing anywhere this week/month/year. The administrative work of being a writer can be intimidating, boring, and confusing. At best it offers delayed gratification. So why bother? For one reason, writers need readers, and publications are still the best way to find them. For another, women (and female-identifying and non-binary) writers are underrepresented in the literary landscape, year after year. Real progress has been made, thanks to women calling out and VIDA counting the skewed demographics, and editors becoming more conscious of bias. But if we are going to be published more, we have to submit our work more. Why shouldn’t it be your writing on the editor’s desk?
This group will help you get it there. Designed for female and non-binary submitters of all stripes, our short weekly meeting will offer community, insights, and accountability. We will demystify the process and, where we have access, we will hold the door open for others.
All genres of writing are welcome, as are writers at all stages of their careers. We will troubleshoot your submission questions, share recommendations for journals, workshop your cover letters, hear from an editor or two, and relate stories of successes and frustrations. Most of all, our supportive weekly check-ins will make you submit your work. Over our eight weeks together, you will choose a submissions goal and we will hold you to it.
Your leaders, Rachel and Anne, have been submitting for years, across multiple genres and publication types. We will share what we’ve learned and the missteps we’ve made along the way. We will also be submitting right along with you!
*Please use your own self-identification to determine whether this group is a fit for you. “Women” is shorthand here, and does not fully encompass who we wish to invite; we aim to be inclusive across the spectrum of gender identity, and we hope those with non-binary and non-cis identities will join in.
Anne Beatty submitted her first short story to The Atlantic while in college, in 1998. Twenty years and many rejections later, she finally published an essay in The Atlantic. Her writing has also appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. In 2019 one of her essays was listed as Notable in the Best American Essays anthology. A writer by night, by day she is a high school English teacher.
Rachel Richardson has been submitting poems to magazines since 1997. Her first submission, to The New Yorker when she was a senior in high school, received a form rejection, but her second, five years later, to Witness, was her first acceptance. Since then, she has published poems in APR, The New York Times, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Rachel is the author of two books of poems, the recipient of Stegner and NEA Fellowships, and she currently teaches in the St. Mary’s College MFA program. (She would still like to get a poem into The New Yorker.)