By Anthony J. Mohr

When a literary journal disappears, a little hole appears in my heart. It’s happened too often. Now, when Duotrope’s Sunday morning Weekly Wire reaches my inbox, I race to the section marked “publisher listings with major status changes”and hope they don’t say a place that once published me “has permanently closed to submissions,” “is on indefinite hiatus to submissions,” or “is believed to be defunct.” The first two phrases are usually euphemisms for the third: defunct, as in dead.

Maybe I’m unlucky, but as of this writing, too many of my homes either no longer exist or languish in prolonged hospice. Some just disappear, like Circle Magazine. The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts died in 2011 and is still dead.

Others tender a tinge of hope. In October 2016, Word Riot claimed they were “temporarily closed for a six-month hiatus.” They have yet to wake up…

By Jill Kandel

I brought a 1,500-word essay to my first writing workshop. So proud of it I could barely spit. After two hours of lecture and discussion on writing short, the instructor said, “Bring it back tomorrow. Cut it in half.” I spent the night cutting, pasting, moving, revising, and proudly broughtexactly750 words to class the next morning.

Six days later – our writing workshop nearly over – I sat down with the instructor for a one on one. I was a lifelong reader and a nurse by profession. A forty-year-old who didn’t know how to pronounce the wordgenre.My instructor gave me a long list of great books on writing, explained what literary journals were, kindly taught me how to saygenre, and challenged me to write a 750-word piece forBrevity.

I spent the next two years reading every single book on…

For editors, rejection is often a gut-level process: they’ve edited this journal for 5, 10, 15 years; they know instinctively if a piece doesn’t fit. For writers, rejection sucks. No matter how much we know that rejection is not feedback, we take it to heart. Question our worth. Wonder if we’ll ever write anything publishable. Rejection’s sting is the price we pay for the occasional, glorious feeling of acceptance—that we can’t predict or control.

But we can control our work. Often, a piece that’s been rejected multiple times has an identifiable problem. Take a look at your orphan essay, book or pitch. One of these issues might apply:

You’re submitting to the wrong outlet. The lowest bar to clear. Editor after editor has told me that half—half!—of what they receive is “wrong.” Not necessarily poorly written, but sent to the wrong place. A sweet personal essay sent…

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore will be offering a one-hour webinar next week, titled The Power of Story: Finding the River of Meaning in Your Memoir or Essay, as part of Creative Nonfiction‘s virtual education program.

The online webinar will examine the craft elements that can transform a memoir or essay from a mere collection of scenes or observations into something powerful, and how writers can create a dynamic, compelling whole greater than the sum of its many parts. The goal, as Langston Hughes writes, is to tell a story that is “older than the flow of human blood in human veins.”

• FIND the power of story and discover how locating your “Invisible Magnetic River” will insure that readers stay engaged and curious from beginning to end.
• LEARN how story can help to solve many of the frustrations and obstacles that can…

How the 3-act structure looks for fiction (taken from https://www.nownovel.com/blog/three-act-formula-novels/).

The 3-act structure is a common form for storytelling. Movies and plays in particular adhere closely to this model most of the time. While in fiction you can write to fit the structure, nonfiction makes it a little trickier because you need to adhere to the facts. And surprise! Our real lives don’t necessarily fit into neat little storytelling containers.

That being said, I have found the 3-act structure useful in shaping my nonfiction. Reading more about the form helped me at a crucial time when I was struggling to organize my memoir. Nonfiction won’t fit every single criterion set out in the 3-act structure, but the form can be helpful as a loose guide.

When I teach memoir and other nonfiction classes, I always spend time talking about the 3-act structure. I adapted this 3-act guide from Mary Carroll…

This summer, I consider my professional companion to be Donald Graves, one of the most influential thinkers in the history of writing instruction. As I prep for fall teaching, consider how writing and literacy instruction overlap, and research new pieces on the writing process and life, I’m reading, eagerly but deliberately, Graves’s 1983 book, Writing: Teachers & Children at Work.

Writing developed from Graves’s groundbreaking National Institute of Education study on writing instruction in the late 70s. There is much to learn from his research, thinking, and recommendations. But my favorite Graves lesson, by far, comes 85% of the way through Writing (p 270). I believe my friends in both writing and education will like it too:

After four years of working with the study in Atkinson, New Hampshire, when all the data were in and the information brewed down to the most important finding, we recorded that:

WRITING IS A HIGHLY IDIOSYNCRATIC PROCESS THAT VARIES…