Several months ago, I visited the Rubenstein Rare Books & Manuscript Library at Duke University. My purpose? I needed to research an individual for a possible picture book biography. Duke housed my subject’s archives in one of their collections. As I sorted through photographs and papers in the quiet of the reading room, I stopped, every so often, to read a letter addressed from friend to friend, mother to child, sister to sister.

Each time I read a salutation, I navigated a mixture of strange emotions. Maybe a little giddiness at access to words intended to be shared between writer and recipient, as if I now knew a secret. Also, perhaps a dash of impropriety as if I were reading someone else’s mail. Which I was, of course, reading someone else’s mail. I’m sure we’ve all been there before, that sense of reading something written to another, something intended for someone else’s eyes—not necessarily yours.

A particular energy arrives on the page when we read an epistolary essay or direct address essay, this form of writing that the author seemingly intends for someone else. As readers, we find ourselves pulled in because of the excitement of being part of an inside conversation. 

Also, maybe we feel just that tiny, delightful touch of sneakiness. Are we supposed to be reading this? Is this a bit like slicing open a letter sent to your sister? Reading your boss’ email? Finding a note slipped into the back of the library book the previous borrower used as a bookmark? No one intended these words for you. Oh, the intrigue!

In my view, the narrator in a direct address essay writes to a “you” character (not to be confused with writing in the second-person point of view). Perhaps a parent, a friend, or a stranger. I consider the epistolary essay to be a subset of the direct address because these essays take the form of a letter. For example: Dear Mom. Love, the narrator. (While I won’t say more about this here, it’s important to note that sometimes the “you” character can be an inanimate object).

One of the noticeable qualities of the direct address or epistolary essay is the sense of intimacy rising from the page. Since the intended reader is no longer a nameless, unknown person, the words often convey a deeper sense of knowing. Of course, increased intimacy isn’t necessarily a characteristic we always want to achieve in every essay. But for certain content, the heightened intimacy contributes to the strength of the writing.

The Writer Benefits of YOU

In addition, I recognize several benefits you as a writer can gain when you use the direct address or epistolary structure:

Circumvent the Internal Critic

When you choose to write your essays directed toward another individual, this can often circumvent that internal critic always wanting to comment from the side. The imaginary audience of possible readers shrinks to just a person: a spouse, a child, a parent, a friend, a stranger you saw at the grocery store. Of course, the presence of one person versus many doesn’t necessarily eliminate the critic’s voice, but it can certainly be a tool that might help.

Bring a Sense of Community

The direct address can bring a sense of community to your writing practice. Often the act of writing is a solitary venture. You craft the words alone. However, with the direct address, you invite another presence into your story, and you remember in a tangible way that you are not alone. This addresses “you” joins with your creative practice.

Communicate a Difficult Subject Matter

The direct address easily becomes a sideways opportunity to explore or communicate topics a reader might directly ignore. The direct address feels somewhat less like the author intends the content for the reader. As a result, the reader can develop more of that “fly on the wall” posture as they engage with the words.

Lower the Stakes

The direct address can reduce the stakes as you are drafting. After all, these are just words you are writing to another person, or it’s just a letter. You may find that you can write with greater ease if you choose a person to write to and then adapt a phrase of encouragement such as, “It’s just a letter. It’s just a letter.”

YOU Leading Us to What’s Next

Up until now, I’ve talked of how the direct address might be a good format for an essay. However, sometimes the direct address is the pathway that leads to the final essay. The direct address can serve as a powerful tool to help you say what you may not have realized you wanted to say. Perhaps you’re trying to write about a conflict with a friend, and you’re struggling to identify the emotion present in a scene. Maybe a helpful strategy is pausing in the work and, instead, writing a letter to that person, an authentic, genuine letter that may enable you to unearth emotions you didn’t realize you had. In the end, you can use this new information to help you craft a stronger essay or other work. Ultimately, the direct address or epistolary form can serve as another pathway to find the deeper material.

Where do YOU go from here?

Maybe you already love the direct address or epistolary essay (yay!). Or perhaps the thought of bringing in this YOU seems strange or unfamiliar. Wherever you may find yourself in the writing journey, here are a couple of writing prompts to help you further engage.

Prompt 1 

1. List five conflicts you’ve had with other people; these can range from minor to major; from just today to a lifetime ago.

2. Pick one item from your list and write a letter to the other person involved in the conflict.

3. Reread what you’ve written. Perhaps this is an essay, OR perhaps this content is the springboard for an essay.

Prompt 2 

1. Think of an essay where you find yourself stuck.

2. Rewrite this essay but begin with a greeting to someone. Perhaps an old teacher, a friend, a relative, your neighbor, a stranger, whoever you want.

3. See if any new content, emotion, or reflection emerges from bringing another into the writing.

Prompt 3

1. Write a letter to your past self or your future self and see what essay may emerge.

2. As with the previous prompts, also examine if this letter brings you new content, emotion, or reflection for future writing.

Of course, feel free to lop off the Salutation and Closing in any of these letters and see what happens.

Prompt 4

1. Take an in-progress essay. Choose a person in the essay to address directly rather than refer to in the 3^rd person.

2. Note what happens to your essay when you do this.

I wish YOU the best with bringing in the YOU!

Examples of Direct Address or Epistolary Essays

• This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution by Daniel José Older
• Girl by Jamaica Kincaid (note that this direct address writing is officially categorized as fiction but still is a powerful example)
• Swerve by Brenda Miller
• For a Recently Disco or a Recently Discovered Shipwreck at the Bottom of Lake Michigan by Matthew Olzmann (an example of directly addressing an inanimate object; note that this example is officially categorized as a poem)
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an example of a book-length epistolary essay

Tell us in the comments: Which of these prompts are you going to use to write a direct address or epistolary essay?

Patrice Gopo is the child of Jamaican immigrants and was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She is an award-winning essayist and the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way (a Fall 2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection). Her ties to Jamaica and other parts of the world sparked her early desire to travel to the cities and countries she traced on a globe. In time, as she began writing about her experiences, Patrice became interested in how places contribute to the people we become. Ultimately, she hopes her stories celebrate the beauty of living a multifaceted life. Patrice lives with her family in North Carolina—a place she considers another home. All the Places We Call Home is her first picture book. 

To connect with Patrice, you can find her on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The post The Direct Address, Epistolary Essay, and Energizing Your Writing appeared first on DIY MFA.

Marcus is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. 

Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change.

This led him to become a writer and to found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020.

On a more personal note, Marcus is a word nerd. He is part of our community, and when he reached out to share that he would be publishing his first collection of essays—Readying to Rise—I knew we had to have him on the show.

In this episode ​​Marcus Harrison Green and I discuss:

• How he achieved a unity of voice as he put together his debut essay collection.
• The importance of looking honestly at ourselves and how that can make society better.
• Why he loves living the life of the writer and what it allows him to do in the world.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Marcus Harrison Green

Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity,  and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020.

Readying to Rise

Social justice is an ideal. It’s not a reality. And while there are moments that make it feel tantalizingly close, the moment that follows often punts it right back to the far distance. Growing up black in south Seattle, journalist and essayist Marcus Harrison Green has a keen sense of exactly where and how things break down. From his own experience in the classroom and at the hands of police to his fierce dissection of the racism baked into media and journalism, Green makes poetry of the clarity that comes after long reflection.

In this collection, Green bears sharp witness to the Black Lives Matter movement, his own journey into and out of religious faith, his grandmother’s lessons, his battle with bipolar disorder, human mortality, blatant hypocrisy, and much more.

He shines a light on what hurts the most deeply in us: not only the brutal injustice of a world built by the powerful for the powerful but the close proximity of that brutality to a persistent kernel of hope.

Yet because there is hope, there is conviction. Green never falters in the knowledge that the struggle itself is something to tie ourselves to and define ourselves by. With astute analyses, evocative imagery, profound empathy, and the ability to laugh at it all, these essays, even with their collective weight, leave us much lighter than they found us.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 384

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 384: Writing Personal Essays with Honesty, Authenticity, and Hope – Interview with Marcus Harrison Green appeared first on DIY MFA.

Phillip is the author of over a dozen books: 

• 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag
• 3 works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages)
• 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day).  

He has also edited several anthologies, including one of my personal favorites—Art of the Personal Essay—and he’s the author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. 

He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In this episode Phillip Lopate and I discuss:

• Why you need to have some things you haven’t worked out when you begin to write an essay.
• The ground rules, selection process, and organizational structure for his three volume anthology.
• What qualities make for a great essay, what can kill a piece, and the role the past plays.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate is the author of over a dozen books: 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as  well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag; three works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages), 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day). He has also edited several anthologies (Art of the Personal Essay, American Movie Critics, and Writing New York). He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Glorious American Essay

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves–sometimes critically–to American values. Even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American.

The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity.

Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form.

The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America–racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them–proved fruitful topics for America’s best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.

The Contemporary American Essay

A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century–from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby–selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing.

Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang

If you decide to check out the books, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links: The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970 and The Contemporary American Essay where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 377

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 377: The Art of the American Essay Anthology – Interview with Phillip Lopate appeared first on DIY MFA.

Ana Maria is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights. Her previous books include: Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, which was a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) which is a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home. 

Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, released in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press this fall. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News.

After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

In this episode Ana Maria and I discuss:

• How to write, assemble, and edit collections for two genres at the same time.
• The importance of non-writing work and why it is so valuable to the process.
• What writers of prose can learn from reading and writing poetry.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going (University of Washington Press, 2018) and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights, including Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two previous essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home.  Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, appeared in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press in Fall 2021. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News. Her current NF work-in-progress about Chinese miners along the Columbia River in the late 1800s has received support from Washington Trust Grants for Artists Program. After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people’s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Mile Marker Six

From the back cover:

From Rancho Cucamonga to the Lost Coast, from the scablands to Tupshin Peak, Ana Maria Spagna’s debut poetry collection quakes with the full magnitude and magnificence of a life spent up close and personal with nature. Coyote pups “nose into rattlesnake weeds” and mud bees nest in knotholes under a “sky awash in waves of stars.” Taut lines etch an account of contemporary life in the Anthropocene, chronicling humanity’s effect on the earth, and just as importantly, the earth’s effect on us. “How rarely, now, we drop to our knees,” Spagna laments, “to protect what’s ours,” though she reminds us that “None of it is ours!” Tender in their recollections and observations, these poems teem with the poignancy, precision, and clarity of cut diamonds or, more accurately, splitting “a fir needle lengthwise to spare it harm.” Pulsing. Dazzling. Fierce.

–Jill McCabe Johnson, author of Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea

“Having read some of the poems that have become Ana Maria Spagna’s At Mile Marker Six since their beginnings, I can advise the reader to follow—follow her anywhere, into the deep, over the edge, back to brass tacks, and forward into the somewhere that is a dream of the each and the every.  Most crucially—and with a sacredness she invents through her clear-eyed, open-hearted looking—follow Spagna’s language to its precise and lyrical root.  Such is her capaciousness that the poet invites us to introduce what is known to what is felt, and that is where love roosts, not just for us, but for every made, built, or born thing.”

–Carol Ann Davis, author of The Nail in the Tree, Atlas Hour, and Psalm

Ana Maria Spagna’s words invite the reader to embrace the intrigue of the wider world. Her poems are not pretty for pretty’s sake, nor do they distract the reader from things often considered ugly. Love, wonder, and the wild are sacred but also sometimes dirty and dead. Is it dirt or is it soil? To some, it is dirt if it is smeared on your face, but soil if we are planting in it. Spagna’s poems impress upon us this: it is always dirt and it is always soil. She takes the world and pokes at it with a trailside stick – forcing us to pay attention, to gaze, to engage with each object of her noticing.

–Mara Panich, author of Blood is Not the Water

You can pre-order a copy here.

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 364: How Writing Is Like Walking a Tightrope – Interview with Ana Maria Spagna appeared first on DIY MFA.

There are the skeptics, those writers who want you to think that the world of writing is closed to outsiders, that you might as well not bother pitching prestigious magazines. Others have been burned by glossies a few too many times, and think that because they couldn’t get into a magazine no one else can either.

So what is aiming high? It’s attempting to get your foot in the door at your dream publications even if you’re worried that large submission inboxes and lack of  literary pedigrees will prevent you from being accepted.

Here’s the truth: while it’s sometimes a longshot to pitch high-end publications like the New York Times or Tin House, it’s always worth the effort to pitch and submit your work to these outlets. Here’s why.

Submitting Helps You Grow

This is practically my motto. After enough rejections, you tend to get used to hearing No. And it’s not as bad as it seems. Editors won’t judge you if your pitch or submission doesn’t land perfectly. Just because they pass doesn’t mean your pitch was the worst email on the face of the earth, despite the sinking feeling in your stomach. Sometimes editors say no because they just ran something similar, have a specific editorial vision, or they already commissioned enough pieces for the section.

Sometimes editors will give you feedback. No, they probably won’t read through line-by-line, but editors will likely give you a jist of why they passed on your submission. It’s helpful to know if an editor you respect enjoyed reading your piece even if they can’t commission it. And you’ll go forward thinking of yourself as a serious writer because you’ve sent your work to these publications. Submitting your work to prestigious outlets has a way of making you feel that you’re putting in the proper dedication to it.

There’s Always a Chance You’ll Get Accepted

Don’t believe me? It’s true! Jamison Hill writes about what it was like to write, submit, and receive an acceptance from the New York Times Modern Love editor Daniel Jones, who called his essay “lovely” even though he was rejected in the past. Since there’s a lot of talk about the Modern Love column changing writers’ lives, it’s no surprise that Hill was shocked and pleased to receive an acceptance he never saw coming.

To increase your chances of getting accepted, it’s always a good idea to have multiple people read your piece before you send it to a dream publication. While they won’t judge you negatively for a strong submission that doesn’t quite make the cut, you want to make sure that every sentence pulls its weight, your word count matches what the section requires, and you don’t have embarrassing typos that make you look lazy. For an essay of any magnitude, it can’t hurt to find a workshop group or take an online class to work with others also trying to get a stellar byline.

You May Regret Not Trying for A Dream Publication

What if you decide not to go for your dream publication and instead submit your work to a journal that you’re not proud to be a part of? You may receive an easy acceptance, but your work may not garner the readers you hoped for in another outlet. It’s likely, especially if this is a story close to your heart, that if you don’t try to submit your work to a prestigious outlet, you might wonder if it would have been accepted if you were less afraid. Don’t let this be you.

Take a chance on your writing and submit. You never know.

Kayla Dean has written for publications like Electric Literature, Ploughshares online, Darling, and Bella Grace. She has an MA and BA in English. You can find her on Twitter @kayladeanwrites.

The post Why You Should Aim High When Pitching Nonfiction Essays appeared first on DIY MFA.