January lit mag brag!
Come on out and brag your lit mag.
Welcome to our weekend conversation!
Before we jump in, a quick announcement: We will be reading Post Road no. 42 for our February Lit Mag Reading Club.
You can order the issue here. Or, if you would like to wait a few days, I should be able to provide you with a discount code by Monday. Stay tuned.
If you don’t yet know about it, you can learn all about our Lit Mag Reading Club here.
Now, as some of you know, it is the last weekend of the month!
I say “some of you” because, if you are anything like me, you in fact had no idea what day it was until a short time ago. My daughter seems to have caught some bug from school and passed it along to me. We’ve both spent the past nine or so days splayed out on our respective couches, watching our respective shows and passing a box of tissues between us.
The good news is that I am now up to my eyeballs in celebrity gossip and, if any of you have been following the scandal involving the actors who starred in Colleen Hoover’s movie adaptation of It Ends With Us, whew baby, what a ride! I have a lot of opinions on the matter, though this is probably not the place to discuss them. Needless to say, if you’ve gotten your teeth into this story too, please see me after class.
The other good news is that I did manage to keep more or less on top of my work. Funny enough, I had not one but four column ideas I was developing for this weekend. One of these was of particular interest to me and was nearly ready to go. I was just sitting down to edit it when I thought, wait a minute, what is today’s date, even?
Then I peered out from my sniffly-coughing-TMZ-Perez-Hilton fog and realized, lo! There shall be no column this weekend! It is the end of the month!
Good heavens January went by fast. And also slow.
But here we are. We have, yet again, stumbled, fumbled, cartwheeled, slow-danced, cake-walked, fretted, strutted, belted, sniffled, coughed, wheezed, sneezed and puttered our way right into the end of another month. Shazam!
Those of you longtime readers know just what this means.
For those of you who are brand new here, welcome!
The end of each month is the space to celebrate all of you. It is the place where we all come together to high-five each other for the hard work, the perseverance, the commitment, unwavering vision, unshakeable determination, grit, hustle and all else required to see creative projects through and get them out into the world.
Did you publish work this past month? Tell us all about it!
Please do not be shy. Sharing your work and telling us how that work found its way to publication is a wonderful way to guide and inspire other writers. So step right up!
Tell us!
Where did your piece appear?
How did you find this venue?
How many places did you send the piece to before it found its happy little home?
Did you revise as you sent it out or was it done and out the door?
Did the editor work with you on revisions?
Are you pleased with the final result?
Come on out, friends. Forget the celebrity gossip. It is time to brag your lit mag!
Oh wow! So this summer I wrote an essay about menopausal Edith Wharton's midlife reinvention, linking it to All Fours, which had just been shortlisted for National Book Award. A dream publication said they wanted the essay...and then the editor ghosted me (this was before the fires); I nudged the editor all to no avail. Sigh...then remembered that it was Edith Wharton's birthday in Jan, so I sent the pitch to LitHub and ... they took it! Lessons: write the thing you love, be patient, search for news pegs... and here is the piece: https://lithub.com/edith-wharton-and-the-clarifying-rage-of-the-menopausal-writer/
Happy to have a poem in the British journal The Rialto, a longtime dream. It’s print-only but you can read it here:
https://www.poetalicewhite.com/rialto
They never sent a proof, which freaked me out, but it was otherwise a delight to work with them!