publishing Archives - The HerStories Project

We Have a Big Announcement!

We have exciting news, and we are thrilled to finally share it with our HerStories community today! Last week, we signed a contract with She Writes Press to publish our next anthology, Mothering Through the Darkness! We could not be happier about this. Have you heard of She Writes Press? In the publishing world, many people refer to them as a “hybrid publisher.” In their own words, this is how the She Writes team describes their business:

She Writes Press is unique in the world of publishing because we’re neither traditional publishing, nor are we self-publishing. We have begun to bill ourselves as a “third way” and we proudly occupy the gray zone, a much-needed alternative in a rapidly changing publishing landscape.”

She Writes is an independent publishing company that gives writers more control than a traditional publisher; they provide high-quality services as well as a positive community experience.

Jessica and I have had a great experience with self-publishing our first two books; we particularly found our groove with My Other Ex. But we are very much looking forward to publishing with She Writes—from working with their cover designer, to their editing team, to being part of a community that helps promote women writers and their work.

For more information on She Writes Press, their services, and how to submit your manuscript to them for consideration, visit their website. Right now, our book is slated for publication in fall 2015! We are so excited; we’ve been steadily receiving submissions, and we look forward to receiving more in the coming weeks. If you’re thinking about submitting an essay but you’ve been on the fence, we hope you’ll take the plunge.

On that note, we are happy to share that we will be extending our deadline for our call for submissions and writing contest for Mothering Through the Darkness. The deadline for submissions is now January 1st, 2015. For more information on the anthology, the guidelines, the contest, and how to submit, read this post. And you can submit your essay directly by following this link.

Subscribe to our newsletter to continue receiving updates about our project and our partnership with She Writes Press!

Keep reading

How to Write A Personal Essay That Will Dazzle an Editor

Ironically, as a reader, I never used to be a fan of anthologies or collections of personal essays.

As a teacher, I did love showing students how to write personal essays or short memoir pieces. As an English teacher and a writing instructor, it often felt miraculous to me how a mediocre piece could be transformed in just a few short weeks through revision, how a piece could evolve from bland and cliched to raw, powerful, and beautiful. But I never liked reading short pieces in my leisure time.

It wasn’t until I started writing as a blogger and freelance writer that I started to appreciate collections of personal essays as a genre. I love seeing writers that I “know” online take different perspectives and approach topics with unique styles. (The anthology published by Brain, Child Magazine called This Is Childhood, featuring ten of my favorite writers, is a wonderful example of this.) As a parent, reading about other mothers’ experiences from so many different angles has helped me gain insight into myself as a mother.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal essays from three different perspectives: as a reader, as a writer, and now as an editor. I’ve been trying my hand at publishing my own pieces, and I know that it’s hard, really hard, to write a great personal essay. After our call for submissions for My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends, I also spent months reading essays with an editor’s eye, trying to decide which pieces to accept and which to pass on. And that was just as hard.

And it occurred to me as a beginning editor that we editors are not often transparent about what we are looking for. I’m lucky in the sense that I taught writing and developed writing curricula for well over a decade, and all of the best practices (and unwritten rules) of memoir and essay writing are (somewhat) fresh in my mind. But most of us writers haven’t taken an English class in quite a while. And we aren’t recent MFA graduates either.

So here’s what I think — as a teacher, writer, editor, and reader — about the ingredients of a great personal essay, one that is carefully crafted to draw in a reader, make her care about a topic, and keep reading.

1. Use what you know about good fiction and storytelling. You should develop characters, settings, and plot (a sequence of events) into a story. Use sensory details and vivid description to create separate, carefully chosen scenes.

2. Combine the personal and the universal. This is your story, your life, your emotions but your writing should also express and reveal a larger meaning, a theme, a deeper truth, beyond the surface details of plot and character.

3. Find your voice. More importantly, find your unique voice that is best for each piece, or different moments of the same piece. As Kate Hopper, in the invaluable Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers, explains, voice is:

“the feel, language, tone, and syntax that makes a writer’s writing unique. In nonfiction, voice is you, but not necessarily the you sitting in front of the computer typing away. Voice can be molded by a writer to serve the subject about which she is writing.”

It might take a while to find the best voice for a piece. Is the right voice ironic, funny, anxious, playful, breathless, or solemn? We all have multiple identities and show different parts of ourselves at different times. Use that versatility in your writing.

4. Alternate focusing in and focusing out. Choose specific and compelling moments, memories, and feelings, and hone in on them, using those particular moments to help to convey theme and purpose. Pretend you are using a video camera to focus in and out, slowing down the action, like a cinematographer, very purposefully to guide the reader toward what’s important in the piece.

5. Be specific, not general. This is what I called “The Rule of the Pebble” to my students (thanks to Nancie Atwell, my writing teacher guru). It basically means don’t write about a general topic or idea; write about one particular person, place, time, object, or experience. In other words, don’t try to write about all pebbles everywhere (or “love” or “friendship” or “football” or “sunsets”). Write about this one particular pebble (or the friend that broke your heart freshman year, or the sunset that you saw last night, or memory, or place), its meaning to you, the concrete details that shape how you think about it.

William Carlos Williams’ advice for writers:

Say it, no ideas but in things.

6. Experiment and play. Try out different literary devices and techniques, such as similes, personification, and metaphors. Or experiment with using different sentence lengths strategically. Use repetition, of words, of lines, of phrases. Play with imagery. Many of these devices should only be used sparingly, but, used effectively, they can add surprises and richness to your writing.

7. Learn the difference between revision and editing. You must do both. It’s easy as a writer to focus on spelling errors and sentence structure, rather than making big (painful) changes to our writing. Revision means “to look again.” You do things like: make sure that your theme and purpose for writing are clear; try out different leads (ways to begin the piece); rethink your conclusion; change the organization.

In editing, a separate stage, we do things like catch run-on sentences, fix errors in punctuation or spelling, or replace overused words and expressions.

8. Read, read, read, and read some more. What all writers have in common, as far as I know, is that they’re constantly reading. They pay attention to their favorite writer’s craft and style and try them out in their own writing. They internalize the beauty and the utility of the perfect word, the perfect sentence, and the perfect metaphor.

Keep reading