Follow
After publishing two books, teaching a few online writing courses, and completing two calls for submissions, we have come to a realization: we are absolutely blown away by the writers in our HerStories Project community. The women who have submitted to our anthologies and taken our writing courses often leave us moved, amazed, and speechless with their writing. And we think it’s time we shine a spotlight on the talented voices in our community.
We are positively thrilled to announce a regular HerStories column, coming in March, featuring your voices. The HerStories Voices column will be an opportunity for women writers to submit essays to be featured on our website twice a month. And we are even more excited to share that we will be paying you to share your essays with us.
We’ll be publishing essays twice a month as part of our regular HerStories Voices column, and paying $40 for each essay that we publish. So what are we looking for? The column’s tagline is “Real Women, Real Moments, Exceptional Stories.” You can visit our brand new Submit to HerStories Voices page for full details on how to submit, along with some submission guidelines and suggestions. But to put it simply, here’s what we’re asking:
Send us an essay focused on an experience or moment – big or small – that transformed you or made you realize something important.
We aren’t asking for specific subject matter or themes, but rather essays that are connected by a universal thread of moments of change, and uncovering meaning from your experience. Our favorite personal essayists are skilled at knowing the difference between an “anecdote” and a moment of change that’s the basis for a meaningful story.
In Writing Motherhood, Lisa Garrigues points out that most of us do not look back on our lives and remember days or months or years. Instead, we remember moments. She says, these moments
“are not necessarily sensational or traumatic, but they are usually transformative…. The same is true for motherhood. What makes motherhood memorable is not the vast chronology of raising our children from diapers to adulthood but rather the moments — big and small, significant and insignificant — that happen every day.”
These small moments and their accompanying meaning, inspiration for growth, or impetus for transformation, are what we want you to share with us in your essay submissions. We have some fantastic essays we’d love you to read for inspiration. These essays, all written by members of our HerStories Project community, are great examples of the type of content we are looking for with this series.
If you’re looking for a roadmap to help you craft, refine, and submit the perfect essay, our winter writing bootcamp, Publish Your Personal Essay, is a great fit! This six-week, self-paced, interactive online course begins February 2nd. Registration is limited, but we have a few more spaces left! Learn how to develop, revise, edit, and skillfully submit your personal essay while becoming part of a writers’ group. We’d love to have you! You can read full details and sign up here.
Please check out our HerStories Voices submission page for full details on how to submit, reminders about what we’re looking for, word count, and contact information. Essay submissions can be sent to herstoriesvoices@gmail.com. We will publish our first two essays in the new column in March! We can’t wait to read your submission!
Be sure to join us on Facebook to keep up with our growing writing community!