I’ve been having conversations recently about voice and audience, social media and readership, work and attention.
As writers, how do we find good homes for our writing? Is a platform “better” if there are more readers? Is it wrong to want additional readers? What about the moral issues we have with social media? We’re “supposed to” use these tools to encourage our “careers.”
Does a writer need social media? How artificial is the validation one finds there? Is it wrong to want to promote my writing on Facebook when I have major issues with how data is collected, mined, and manipulated?
Marge Piercy’s poem “For the young who want to” has been taped to my fridge for a few years (in a few different homes!). “Work is its own cure,” she writes. “You have to/like it better than being loved.”
So I know that these questions about audience aren’t new. Writers have always put energy into finding the readers who get what we are trying to do. Social media simply represent another dimension.
On that note (and because I’m trying to get 100 rejection letters this year), I thought I’d focus this post on publishing opportunities. Publishing is one of the ways that a writer “finds” her “audience”:
- UW-Madison Libraries has compiled a list of feminist, women’s, and lgbtq publishers, useful for both readers and those of us who have written work that needs a home.
- I was also looking for a list of Florida-based literary journals and found this very useful clearinghouse compiled and hosted by Sawpalm.
- This is older but still fun “City Guide” of literary Miami by P. Scott Cunningham taught me a lot. Even though some of it is out of date, I wish I had read the article when I first moved to Miami.
- Lambda Literary hosts an ongoing online list of calls for submissions that are LGBTQ-focused or geared towards LGBTQ writers.
- For all of you book reviewers out there, this is a massive list of literary journals that accept submissions of book reviews. It comes to us courtesy of poet Diane Lockwood.
- Entropy is still maintaining a “Trump Watch” page on their website, a compilation of lots of articles and resources about current events and how to deal with them. There is also a list of calls for submissions for poetry about our current crises. So glad to have this resource.
- Here’s another list of where to send poetry related to current events. This list is hosted by Trish Hopkinson.
Where and how do you find places to publish your poems? What do you think of questions related to readership and audience? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Freesia McKee 