Write, Publish, and Shine

Here are five things editors want in your writing submissions to journals. This is all based on my experience reading submissions, publishing work in a lit mag, and talking to dozens of editors from other literary journals who do the same.If you'd like to find assignments to help you get more of each of the five items in your writing, check out my article here: https://rachelthompson.co/w-r-i-t-e/

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In this episode, Rachel Thompson talks with Lilly Dancyger of Narratively, about the responsibility of editors to elevate voices left out the conversation, why you should know what conversations have already been had about the subjects of your writing, her experiences with memoir writing both deep and shallow with ideas on how to find the deep stories that resonate with readers and editors.

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“Write rhymes with fight for a reason. We’re not all meant to be at the front line. I’m way more comfortable sitting down and trying to figure out how to write back against something that I really dislike.”*The Humber Literary Review* celebrates diversity and is built upon the idea that a healthy and vital community—artistic or otherwise—is an inclusive one, without barriers or discrimination.Work from the *HLR* has been featured in *Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Essays,* and has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. They are always looking to publish and promote more emerging artists.

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Listen to hear about Lue’s Afrofuturistic writing and for insight into how things work at Room magazine where we are both collective members.

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As in the midst of this vaccinated pandemic life, I have had many awkward social moments and truly stressful interactions where I don't feel connected to myself and who I am.And each time that happens, I realize I haven't been writing enough. I've missed the opportunity to practice my “cool loneliness.”

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In this episode, I talk to Tamara Jong about celebrating writers’ publication wins.Tamara Jong (she/her) is a Montreal-born mixed-race writer/cartoonist of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has appeared in Anomaly, Carte Blanche, Room Magazine, The New Quarterly, Invisible Publishing and Body & Soul; Stories forSkeptics and Seekers.Listen to her take on holding each other up as writers, jealousy, and persevering to publish. Plus she talks about how to get started in narrative comic art.

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I'm reissuing this interview as a companion to a piece that was just posted on my website, written by Lucy Wilde, a writer in my course and membership community, about publishing with Atticus Review in a series of articles called "How I Published With..." You can find this article on rachelthompson.co/articles.As Lucy, my student, writes, "There are two main reasons I wanted to see my work in Atticus Review, the quality of the writing and the fact that they are interested in publishing hybrid, unconventional work that pushes boundaries."There is a lot to love and a lot of helpful instruction about how to write publish and shine in this conversation with Atticus Review’s former Managing Editor, Dorothy Bendel.

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“I think there is too much pushing forward in a way that is not motivated by pleasure, that is motivated by shaped ambition or greed or some sense that people have as to what they should want. Zooming over everything else. And to me that is not literature. That is careerism.” —Wendy Lesser, founder of The Threepenny Review.

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You probably already know, or have heard, that rejection is a *big* part of writing to be read and submitting your work to lit mags. You probably also wish you could snap your fingers and become immune to rejection, but, sorry, it’s unavoidable. It just feels bad—we're wired for that. And, unfortunately, were we to totally avoid feeling bad about rejection, it would make us pretty bad writers. To be blasé about being turned down would likely require turning off all our feelings. And feeling is an occupational requirement for us writers.Before we leap right into those bad feelings of rejection, I asked the writers with us today to go through some of the things they learned they can do to minimize the chance of rejection for their work.

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Ellen Chang-Richardson is a poet, writer and editor of Taiwanese and Cambodian Chinese (or Chinese Cambodian) descent, whose writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Vallum Contemporary, and Watch Your Head, among others—including Room, which you'll hear about coming up.Hege A. Jakobsen Lepri is Norwegian-Canadian translator and writer. She had her first story published in English in 2013 and has since chosen that as her writing language.Lori Sebastianutti is a writer and teacher and former managing editor of the Fertility Matters Canada blog. She has published in The New Quarterly, The Hamilton Review of Books, and Nurture, which you'll hear all about in this episode.Angela Wright is a writer, historian, and political analyst based in Toronto, Canada. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Catapult, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Quarterly. She has performed her poetry in venues across the United States and Canada, including at Canada’s National Arts Centre.These are four writers who actively submit their work, who persist at it and who publish. Among what they have in common is that they each found their “lane” in writing, and that lane gave them the traction to publish in lit mags and succeed by their unique definitions of “success” for their writing.They didn't necessarily start out in their lane, so you'll hear from them about finding that sweet spot, that place where what they are writing and where they are submitting fit.

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