Maybe one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to submit your work for fellowships and residencies, to contests, or for publication. Maybe you’ve got a project ready to go. If so, yay! Good on you. Before you hit send, let’s review some best practices to help you vault over that slush pile.
I’m going to skip the fundamentals, so if you need a refresher, read this, this, and this.
I asked some writers who’ve worked the other side of Mount Slushie: What snapped your glazed eyes to attention?
Sometime this holiday season, I’m going to make my grandmother’s broccoli-cheese casserole. It’s gooey, it’s crunchy, and every time I smell it, it heightens how much I miss her.
That’s the thing about this Season of Eating — so much food, and almost all of it is laden with not just calories but memories, hopes, connections. It might be a challenge for our pants, but it’s a feast for our writing.
Continue reading “The Food Angle”
“The world is in turmoil—everybody is thinking about politics; nobody is thinking about memoir.”
That is just one of the many discouraging things editors and agents told Teresa Wong in late 2016 when she was trying to sell Dear Scarlet, her graphic memoir published this spring.
She also heard: no one wanted to read a book about post-partum depression; no one wanted to read a graphic memoir; and no one wanted to read a graphic memoir about post-partum depression. Continue reading “Rejecting Rejection”