Markets for your short fiction, poetry, and essays ~ most of them pay, one pays especially well

Note: Don't ever miss a post on Quick Brown Fox.  Fill in the "Follow Brian by Email" box to the right under my bio and get each post delivered to your Inbox. 

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Finally, if you’re not yet on my newsletter, send me an email, including your locale, to: brianhenry@sympatico.ca ~ Brian

 

Footsteps in the Dark,
Gothic Fantasy stories 
from Flame Tree

Flame Tree publishing seeks crime stories for anthology. "It's time to turn to the darker side: the cold cases, the grim murders, the desperate villains, and the race against time to solve the crime. We're seeking up to 20 new stories to join our powerful collection of Chilling Crime Short Stories, new and classic tales reaching back into ancient, medieval, Elizabethan and Victorian fiction. From Oedipus Rex and Medea to Thomas More's story of the Princes in the Tower, Scheherazade's 'The Three Apples' and the chilling crime fiction of Dickens, Poe, Henry James, Baroness Orczy and Wilkie Collins." 

Pays 8 cents/6 pence per word for original stories, 6 cents/4 pence for reprints. 

Deadline: March 14, 2021. Guidelines here.

Hungry Zine is a community-focussed zine centring radical food stories, art and culture. Hungry seeks submissions for their first issue, on the theme of “Home Cooking” issue. Accepts poetry, flash fiction and nonfiction {maximum 1,000 words}, and visual art and photography. Pays $50.

Deadline March 15, 2021. Guidelines here.

 

The Sun magazine, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. publishes personal essays, fiction, and poetry. Personal stories that touch on political and cultural issues are welcome. The Sun encourages submissions from writers of color. “Surprise us; we often don’t know what we’ll like until we read it.” Maximum word count about 7,000 words; no minimum.  

Pays $300 - $2,000  for personal essays and short fiction; $100 - $250 for poetry.

Always open to submissions. Guidelines here.

 

CommuterLit is looking for short stories, memoir, novel excerpts and poetry (one poem or a series of poems), in any genre, with a word count of 500 to 4,000.

Deadline: Ongoing – they always need stories. Full submissions guidelines here.

Our Canada magazine wants your stories, whether they’re about your grandma’s famous apple pie or the oopsie-daisy adventure you and your friend took on one fateful winter afternoon. 

“We want to hear about your Hometown and all its quirks and about that Favourite Vacation at home or abroad. Do you have a rickety old car story for our Wheels section? Or are you a Collector of unusual things now cluttering your shelves? Maybe you or someone you know is particularly Crafty or has a talent to be Showcased?

“We love to get stories about The Way it Was and Funny tales of mishaps and misadventures. Finally, because Canada is such a fantastic mosaic, we want to hear from different Cultural viewpoints and about those exciting and/or difficult journeys of Coming to Canada."

Always accepting submissions. Guidelines here.

Women in Higher Education magazine seeks to provide women on campus with practical ideas and insights to be more effective in their careers and lives. Subscribers are especially interested in advice from successful women on campus, communication techniques, leadership, career strategies, ethical values, using intuition, research on gender differences, mentors and role models, problems facing women chairs, and ending sexual harassment.

WIHE is not an academic journal, but rather a monthly print magazine that aims for accessible, engaging articles.  Aim for a “good read.” Try to be upbeat and positive, unless the topic requires a more serious tone. Think about what readers can learn from your article. Give practical ideas and recommendations. Provide concrete examples. Always try to imagine yourself as the reader and ask, “What would I want to know?” about your topic.

Departments
Word counts are estimates, but WIHE  doesn’t publish articles over 1,500 words.

·         In Her Own Words: 800-1,100 words — research results, personal essays and subjective insights on relevant topics

·         Moveable type: 800-1,100 words — synopsis of a useful book

·         Interview: 800-1,100 words — profile a woman leader in higher education

·         Features: 800-1,500 words — new programs, speeches, major research of interest

Pays $150 per solicited guest contribution. Currently, WiHE is not paying for unsolicited guest submissions. 

Always open for submissions. Guidelines here.

See Brian Henry’s schedule here, including online and in-person writing workshops, weekly writing classes, and weekend retreats in Algonquin Park, Alliston, Bolton, Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Georgina, Guelph, Hamilton, Jackson’s Point, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland, Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Southampton, Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt: A Memoir by Anonymous, reviewed by Jennifer Reichow

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt: A Memoir, Anonymous, 2020, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston. Available from Chapters here or through your local independent bookstore here.

I first heard of this anonymously written book in my writers’ group. We discussed how it might be possible to publish a book anonymously in the 21st century. We leaned towards it being the work of an established author trying to write in a different genre.

It couldn’t be a first-time author. In our social media driven culture, agents and publishers actively seek first-time authors with established platforms with a significant following. It’s difficult to evolve a potential book buying audience by producing fresh and regular content while trying to research, write, edit, rewrite, edit some more, query agents and work a day job. 

In previous centuries, authors such as Jane Austen and Mary Shelley published anonymously, though perhaps not by choice. Society discouraged women of certain class from working. If the public knew a woman wrote the book, they disregarded it. Some believed Shelley’s husband authored her seminal novel Frankenstein. More recently politicos who write tell-all books publish anonymously so they can keep their day jobs.

In Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, Anonymous relates how her life turns upside down when her husband abruptly leaves her, taking most of their friends with him in the divorce fallout. Loneliness propels her to connect with others, but she’s fearful of making new friends, dreading the pain of being dumped. Thus Anonymous turns to social media and created @duchessgoldblat.

Derived from the name of a friend’s dog and her mother’s maiden name, Duchess Goldblatt exists only on Twitter. The Duchess, (addressed as Your Grace or more simply, YG by her followers) lives in a made-up town and has a make-believe daughter. Her Twitter bio shows she is the author of several imaginary books such as Feasting on the Carcasses of My Enemies: A Love Story. She uses the gently smiling, neck ruffled face of Frans Hals’s ‘Portrait of an Elderly Lady’ painted circa 1633 as her avatar and book cover. 

The Duchess tweets regularly, attempting to bring a bit of lightness into the sometimes depressing world of social media. She replies to her followers, which endears her to them even more. A fan of Lyle Lovett, she mentions him often, and he takes notice of her amusing tweets. He invites the real-life author to concerts and encourages her to write a book. Interspersed among the details of her fictional Twitter personality, the author reveals her personal history, the hard life that led her to create, live and take comfort through the fictional Duchess Goldblatt.

I knew nothing of the actual @duchessgoldblat when I first read this novel. I believed it to be a fiendishly clever work of fiction; it seemed breathtakingly prescient to set up a Twitter account in order to write a book eight years later. Actually, writing a book wasn’t in Anonymous’s mind in 2012. Her creation of a Twitter persona was a genuine effort to find friendship. 

Log into Twitter and you’ll find that the Duchess is fictionally alive and well and tweeting witticisms such as The only way to be reliably sure that the hero gets the girl at the end of the story is to be both the hero and the girl yourself. Her followers, numbered in the tens of thousands even before the book, are now a few hundred south of 50k. And yes, Lyle Lovett is a follower along with several Pulitzer winners, a White House advisor, and the Presidency of the Italian Republic.

It didn’t hurt Anonymous being published in the year of COVID, guaranteeing that her publisher couldn’t demand any in-person book tours or talk shows even if she’d been so inclined. Her marketing amounted to a virtual book tour where she chatted via Zoom and Crowdcast behind her Duchess avatar. Lyle Lovett even made a supportive appearance.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is fun. The author’s real life is often poignant but led to a fictional Twitter personality that helped Anonymous make a lot of new friends and meet her celebrity crush. You’ll log into Twitter and become a follower, I know you will. You’ll be glad you did. 

***

Note: Quick Brown Fox welcomes your book reviews – or any kind of review of anything, of anywhere or of anybody. If you want to review your favourite coffee shops or libraries, babysitters or lovers (no real names please), go for it. See examples of book reviews here (and scroll down); other reviews here (and scroll down). Read about how to write a book review here.

QBF also welcomes essays about a favourite book or about your experience of reading or writing. To get a taste of what other writers have done, see here and scroll down).

Submit to: brianhenry@sympatico.ca

Include a short bio at the end of your piece and attach a photo of yourself if you have one that’s okay. 

Jennifer Reichow knew as a child she was going to university and be a writer. As so often happens, life interrupted her plan. But now that she’s just retired from a fulfilling nursing career, she’s realizing her dream of becoming a writer. It feels like coming home.

See Brian Henry’s schedule here, including online and in-person writing workshops, weekly writing classes, and weekend retreats in Algonquin Park, Alliston, Bolton, Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Georgina, Guelph, Hamilton, Jackson’s Point, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland, Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Southampton, Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.

“The Girl Who Didn’t Know What She Knew” by Alan MacLeod

Early in my training I was a great admirer of Sigmund Freud. He was all over my books and magazines, peering out from black and white photographs and renderings. I was impressed with his glaring eyes and his spade-like beard. His waist-coat fit comfortably over a slight paunch, with a small Havana perched between his fingers. 

I longed to understand what he was really getting at and secretly hoped for enlightenment in his ways. His recorded voice seemed to arise from a deep and measured place of wisdom and competence. He eluded me, but I did manage to grab onto the mysterious notion of uncovering unconscious motivations.

I had a new patient arrive in my fourth year of practice, whom we’ll call Mary. She had long, curly brown hair, with several bald spots, and wore a modest dress shaded in greys and whites. She was accompanied by her father whose concern was written in his lowered eyebrows and stooped posture. Her mother did not come, despite several invitations.

Mary was only sixteen but stared right through me in a way that suggested a long and troubled life. I kept reminding myself that she was blind. Little information accompanied Mary. She was referred by her busy and blunt internist. The note, congruent with her appearance, said, “Psychogenic blindness and hair-pulling.”

During her father’s description of her sudden loss of sight, Mary sat rigidly, hands folded tightly in her lap, eyes fixed straight ahead. It was an unnerving presentation in one so young. By this time Mary had been through a number of medical workups, all with no physical findings to explain her blindness. I thought perhaps she was bored and disinterested in yet another one.

Mary’s face remained stiff throughout the initial interviews. Nothing penetrated the stillness. The blankness, shrugs, and monotone, communicated an air of indifference. She made no edges visible and was impossible to read.

The first small crack in the facade came when I commented on her missing chunks of hair and asked her to tell me about that.

“It’s just a bad habit,” she blurted in a tone of warning. I wondered if someone had said this to her, maybe admonishing her in some way.

I heeded this caution, but planned to return to it later.

“How are you feeling just before you pull your hair?”

A slight wrinkling of her nose with a crease between her brows suggested confusion. “What do you mean?” she said.

“How do you feel in your guts?” I said while rubbing my belly. I caught myself; she couldn’t see me.

Mary had no idea how she felt. Anxiety resided in her body without her knowledge. She sat tightly with shoulders hunched and back straight. I asked her how she was feeling in her body right now.

“Fine,” she said.

I moved on but over the next few weeks had her do a series of muscle relaxation exercises that helped her to drop her shoulders, soften her jaw, and deepen her breathing. She began to become conscious of the difference between relaxation and tension. She liked fishing at the family cottage, so we talked about “catching the tension and throwing it back into the water”. An almost mischievous smile passed quickly over her face when we talked like this.

At my suggestion she began to track how she was feeling just before and after she pulled on her hair. “It helps me relax,” she said with a shrug and a shy smile. Another little crack in the wall. Without using the word addiction, I asked what might help break this “bad habit.”

She scrunched her face, raised her eyes to mine, and shifted in her seat. With a sigh she said, “Catch it and throw it back in.” It became sort of a game where she practiced the magic of asking her muscles to relax. And they did. She pulled her hair less often.

We began to talk about her childhood. There were long pauses as she seemed to stare at the floor. I wondered what she was seeing in her mind’s eye. She remembered very little. Her voice was mild and childlike, disconnected from the adolescent sitting so still in front of me. It was as if she only had a dim notion of those years, like she knew but didn’t know what went on back then. I asked her to draw some things from her childhood, if she could. Art was her favourite subject in school.

She hesitated, pencil poised over the page, grimacing as if in pain. “No…” she said. “I don’t want to make it real.”

I went cold when she said those words. There was such a feeling of sadness and despair in them, especially for this very self-contained, non-expressive youngster. She knew but didn’t know or didn’t want to know. I was troubled by this sudden change in her, but I had to respect her wishes and let it go. I began to feel like I knew, but didn’t know something, like there were depths here that we both needed to explore.

But we never got the chance. Her father withdrew her from treatment shortly after, citing lack of progress with the blindness and a need for yet another opinion. I remember thinking that she left just as we had started therapy. Sometimes this happens. It’s intriguing to ponder why a parent might scuttle in and pull their child out just as you start to get close. Sigmund has been silent on the matter. I’m still waiting.

Alan MacLeod is a writer and retired psychologist living in Bruce County, Ontario. He's grateful for the Bruce County writing buddies and the inspiration of mighty Lake Huron. Thanks especially to those excellent writers in Brian Henry's Tuesday morning intensive.

See Brian Henry’s schedule here, including online and in-person writing workshops, weekly writing classes, and weekend retreats in Algonquin Park, Alliston, Bolton, Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Georgina, Guelph, Hamilton, Jackson’s Point, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland, Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Southampton, Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.

Intensive Creative Writing classes offered ~ online ~Tuesday evenings and Friday mornings starting in April

Intensive Creative Writing

Offered at two different times 

Tuesday evenings, 6:45 – 9:00 p.m.
April 13 – June 22, 2021 
First reading emailed April 6
Offered online, accessible anywhere there’s Internet

And

Friday mornings, 10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
April 9 – June 25, 2020 {no class June 11}
First readings emailed Sept 11
Offered online, accessible anywhere there’s Internet

Intensive Creative Writing isn't for beginners; it's for people who have been writing for a while or who have done a course or two before and are working on their own projects. You’ll be asked to bring in five pieces of your writing for detailed feedback, including three long pieces. All your pieces may be from the same work, such as a novel in progress, or they may be stand alone pieces. You bring whatever you want to work on. 

Besides critiquing pieces, the instructor will give short lectures addressing the needs of the group, and in addition to learning how to critique your own work and receiving constructive suggestions about your writing, you’ll discover that the greatest benefits come from seeing how your classmates approach and critique a piece of writing and how they write and re-write. This is a challenging course, but extremely rewarding.

Fee: $229.20 + hst = $259

To reserve your spot, email: brianhenry@sympatico.ca 

Instructor Brian Henry has been a book editor and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He publishes Quick Brown Fox, Canada's most popular blog for writers, teaches creative writing at Ryerson University and has led workshops everywhere from Boston to Buffalo and from Sarnia to Saint John. But his proudest boast is that he’s has helped many of his students get published. 

Read reviews of Brian's various courses and workshops here (and scroll down).

See Brian’s complete current schedule here, including online and in-person writing workshops, weekly writing classes, and weekend retreats in Algonquin Park, Alliston, Bolton, Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Georgina, Guelph, Hamilton, Jackson’s Point, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland, Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Southampton, Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.

Congratulations to Tanya, Glen, Nancy, Ray, and Kristy!

If you’ve had a story (or a book!) published, if you’ve won or placed in a writing contest, if you’ve gotten yourself an agent, or if you have any other news, send me an email so I can share your success. And be sure to let know if you're looking for a writers' group or beta readers; a notice in Quick Brown Fox, will help you find them. 

Email me at brianhenry@sympatico.ca ~Brian

 

Hi, Brian.

I wanted to send you a big THANK YOU! I sent a query to Anne Shone after the January 30 workshop on Writing for Kids, and this morning she emailed me and asked me to send my manuscript for SUPERS! No guarantees, of course, but extremely exciting nonetheless. 

I wanted to thank you for your workshops that have helped provide introductions to people in the industry, helped me fix my query letter, and also for your initial critique of my opening chapters a few months back.  This is all extremely helpful and I am very much looking forward to the Tuesday class and continuing to work on improving my writing.  

Have a wonderful day!

Kristy Jackson

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

The next Kid Lit workshop is Saturday, Feb 27 {see here}. It’s probably full, but there will be a similar workshop offered Saturday, April 24, with guest speaker Liz Kemp, an editor with Orca Books. Details haven’t been posted yet, but to reserve a spot, email me at: brianhenry@sympatico.ca ~Brian

Plus, there's a Kid Lit weekly course starting in the spring {see here}. 

 

Hi, Brian.

Just published A Barber’s Son - Recollections of growing up in Toronto in the 1950’s on Amazon.

Cheers

Ray Holmes

Ray’s book is available on Amazon here.

 

Hi, Brian.

Thanks so much for promoting authors and their work! My novel, Victorian Town, a YA paranormal novel with elements of time travel and romance, recently won First In Category for The Dante Rossetti Award for young adult fiction in the U.S.

Best to you,

Nancy Thorne

https://www.nancythorne.com/nancy-thorne-published

 

Hi, Brian.

My weird 2020 finished on a high note. Happy to let you know my short story, “Scrabbling” won second prize (could be worse, eh) in a year end contest that i entered with a group in South Africa known as Deadline for Writers.

Their competition had a prompt: The Meeting and the story was restricted to 1200 words (+/- 50). This is what spilled out.

Cheers,

Glen Benison

You can read Glen’s story “Scrabbling” on Quick Brown Fox here.

 

Dear Brian,

Thistledown Press has offered me a publishing contract for Peacekeeper’s Daughter! They’re offering really good editorial support. I think this is a good fit for my memoir. They’re under new leadership, and are specializing in literary fiction and nonfiction. 

See you Saturday, at the Kid Lit workshop.

Tanya

Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

https://tanyaallattbellehumeur.com/

Note: For information about submitting to Thistledown Press, see here.

 

See Brian Henry’s schedule here, including online and in-person writing workshops, weekly writing classes, and weekend retreats in Algonquin Park, Alliston, Bolton, Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Georgina, Guelph, Hamilton, Jackson’s Point, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland, Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Southampton, Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.