Home » Archives by category » Editors’ Blog
Pen Names
By Glenn Boothe, Assistant Editor Pen names, or pseudonyms…why do writers choose to use them? As a newbie writer in an MFA program, I had not thought about the importance of considering whether or not to use a pen name. I had thought that using a pen name was just a way to remain anonymous, [...]
How to Deal with (Journal) Rejection
By Megan McCormack, Assistant Editor You haven’t heard anything in months. You check your email constantly, your mailbox, your Submittable account, hoping for something—anything, really—to give you hope. Your friends call you obsessed, but really, what do they know? And then, one day, there it is: something in your inbox from the journal. Finally, a [...]
What Wasn’t Written on the Rejection Slip: The Editors’ Diagnosis
By Marisol Ramirez, Assistant Editor Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. That rejection slip may have you thinking, “Well, I must be a bad writer,” and the truth is you very well may be if you are not avoiding these common writing pitfalls that lead to rejection. Let’s not pity ourselves now or be [...]
An Editor’s Perspective on Two Types of Journals
By Michael Smith, Assistant Editor While submitting to journals can be an intimidating experience, being on the other side, working on the editorial staff of a literary journal, can be just as intimidating. If you read journals regularly you have probably had the experience of reading through an issue and thinking at one point or [...]
Be Cool: A Guide to Not Wildly Alienating the Editors
By Ryan Smith, Assistant Editor Publishing poetry can be a tough gig. The daily grind for most poets – the real grind, the dull work we do absent any intrinsic reward, as opposed to the scarce but enormous fruits of writing and wrestling a poem into something halfway decent – involves submitting to lit journals. [...]
Something Larger (Than Life)
By Sara Ross, Assistant Editor In fiction-writing, we cheat and embellish, manipulate worlds to match our whims. We get to do whatever it takes to make a reader feel something, see a bigger picture than what’s there on the page. In creative nonfiction, we’re working within a whole different set of constraints. We’re fighting to [...]
The Art of the Cover Letter
By Kasey Perkins, Assistant Editor Cover letters. I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately as we’ve really plunged into reading submissions for Natural Bridge. As the envelopes pour in, there has been quite the variety of ways in which people choose to introduce themselves to our editors, from typed to handwritten, from fine linen [...]
How I Got Over
By Michael Nye, Guest Blogger Even before I graduated from my MFA program, I had some idea of a story collection in place. This collection comprised nine or eleven stories (digression: always an odd number; for whatever reason, this always appealed to me, that somehow nine or eleven was better than ten or twelve. I [...]
Hollywood Writing
By Seth Raab, Guest Blogger When I moved to LA in 2006, I did so with the hopes of writing either teleplays or screenplays. Six years later, I landed a job as a staff writer on the NBC show “Go On.” And while six years seems like a long time, I consider myself very fortunate. [...]
Some Folks
By Mary Troy, Editor When my first book was published, my sister-in-law said she was sorry not to see herself in my stories, as she believed writers wrote about their families and friends. She told me she did notice her hairstyle on one character and had found her body type on another. I apologized that [...]
