Doing the Work, 08/19/24
Calls for submissions, reading recommendations, writing prompts 08/05/24
Hello friends!
Welcome to the fourth installment of our Doing The Work series. Here, we share opportunities for submitting your work, recommend some great reads, and offer creative exercises for you to try.
In this week's edition:
Calls for Submissions: Opportunities for poets, prose writers, and artists.
Reading Recommendations: A selection of writing I've been enjoying recently.
Creative Prompts: Writing exercises to inspire your creativity.
If you find this post helpful, please share it with your friends and family. Enjoy!
Calls for Submission
This week is an exciting one for submissions. Alaska Quarterly Review just opened up and they are an amazing journal (ranked in the top 30 on many lists). They have published some of my personal favorite contemporary work. Getting published by AQR is a monumental step toward a developing literary career. You can read more about their submissions.
P.S. You will need a Submittable account. It is a free to make, and I’d highly recommend doing it anyway if you want to start trying to publish work, since many journals use them.
Reading Recommendations
Usually I would encourage you to read from the same place that has an open call for submissions. However, if you’re submitting to AQR, they accept pretty much anything other than light verse poetry. Just send them your absolute best. In place of that recommendation I’d like to share one of my favorite poems in recent memory.
It is called Diet Mountain Dew by Timothy Donnelly. You can read the poem in the New Yorker here. Not only is the poem simply very, very good, but it also highlights an important note to remember in your writing career.
Write about what you are passionate about. Write about what inspires you. There is no one right way to write, and you can succeed by writing about your own experiences and interests.
Writing Prompts
One of the best things you can do for yourself as an artist is to create good habits. One of those habits is writing every day. So Sam and I published a book of writing prompts called Poetry Prompts that Don’t Suck. I am pulling one of the prompts from that book for this week. Here it is:
You can do a lot on a road trip. Brainstorm the next great American novel, listen to Taylor Swift’s entire discography, sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Road trips can be long and arduous, short and sweet, or anything in between. Write about a road trip, real or fictional.
And if you enjoyed the prompt, feel free to check out the book in its entirety!
Thank You & Good Luck
If you found this useful, check out last Monday’s post:
To support our work, please share this post with a friend and subscribe.
Thanks for reading,
Sam & Corey.