Hello, friends!
A few years ago, with this post, I started keeping a list of the essays and stories and poems that began—some spark of them, at least—with a Writing in the Dark exercise, and then went out into the world and found a home in a journal, a magazine, a memoir or novel, or an anthology.
The list kept growing and growing and growing until it outgrew this post and the system I was using to keep it updated.
So my wonderful administrator, Jorian, made us a browsable directory you can move through by writer, by publication, by the recognitions these pieces have earned along the way.
This list holds work accepted through a curated, outside editorial process—journals, magazines, anthologies, contests—rather than work we publish ourselves. This is not because self-published work matters less (I self-publish here on Substack constantly, and love so much of what I read across Substack), but because so many of you do submit your work to curated journals and we need a place to celebrate getting a yes from an outside source. This is that place!
But also, none of us needs to want publication. There’s a whole life, in fact, more life, in the practice of writing itself than in any experience of publication. But I’ve found that writing toward something outside ourselves—toward mattering to a stranger—tends to change the writing, and the writer, in ways worth honoring.
The directory is, and always will be, gloriously incomplete. If something of yours belongs on it, please add it below—I’ll be so glad to include you. If you emailed me in the past and we didn’t get your work added to the directory, that’s not because we didn’t want to. It’s because Billie started grad school and I was without any assistance for nine months, but now we have Jorian (yay, Jorian!) who set this up in a way she can stay on top of, so, please send (or re-send as the case may be by using the link here:
So much to celebrate here, and so much more to come.
This is surprisingly moving— I feel like I am looking at new constellations in a sky I thought I already knew. Wonderful.
What a list!!! Blown away in the best way. ❤️❤️❤️