13 Nonfiction Lit Mags With Open Theme Calls
Plus! Sophia Hembeck shares 4 Lessons Learned From Attending Terrible Writing Workshops
Our guest writer this week is
, author of The Muse Letter here on Substack and of the essay collection, Things I Have Loved. In her essay below, she explores what she had learned from both taking and teaching writing workshops and the importance of vulnerability, self-awareness, and perseverance in the writer's journey.This essay starts, like all of my essays do, with a high level of procrastination and waiting for the muse to arrive. I should know better I think as I write this, I’ve been teaching writing for three years now and the first thing I say to my students is: to not wait for inspiration to come.
If I would practice what I teach, I would have started this text with a writing exercise, I would have set a timer and written a little poem based on a random word I picked by flipping through a book. Or I would have just started to free write, my stream of consciousness, well I guess that is what I am doing now. Buckle up, fuckleheads! We’re on a quest to kill a white page.
I do often wonder what it is that makes us write. Is it prestige? Connection? A deadline? Or the fact that I just turned on the volume of the song that is playing on my Spotify list so I can tune out all other thoughts? My inner critic, who I seem to be on good speaking terms for the last few years, is a valued asset but usually not allowed to see the rehearsals. And the loud music helps to keep me focused, it’s just enough of a disruption that I can lean against. Writing is so much about self-parenting, about knowing your needs and meeting them, being nurturing af because everything else is just too much self-deprecating torture. Which is also the second thing I teach my students: writing doesn’t have to be a soul-sucking endeavour excavating every little bit of joy out of your life. In spite of what some people who teach writing seem to think.
I’ve attended my first writing workshop at 21. My novel draft had been selected from hundreds of submissions and the price was a scholarship to travel to Austria for a week of discussions and honing my writing skills. The novel began with a scene of a young woman in a hospital having a panic attack unable to understand what is happening to her. It was a deeply personal novel like so many first works are, heavily autobiographical with only a few details changed; like using a different location and finding a more viable reason as to why these panic attacks were happening. Someone clearly had to die. Her sister or her best friend, I could never decide. But it had to be something severe. A real reason, so the reader – you – could be like: Yes, that makes sense. That’s a reason to go mad. For a long time I called the novel: Splinters (Splitter) – I did not finish it.
The workshop was attended by seven young aspiring writers like me, three writing school students, the headmaster of a prestigious writing course, a couple of members of the literary organisation that hosted the workshop, and a delegate from the writers guild of Austria. Basically a divide of very young people and older men. I was the last to get feedback that day. And then I walked home and cried. I did not cry while I sat there, with a frozen smile, looking at the other participants. We were not allowed to say anything while we got our feedback, apparently, that was a rule established by some authors in the 60s or 70s. So I didn’t. We were though allowed to ask three questions at the end of it. I didn’t have any. I just sat there in complete shock as to what had just happened.
Every time after that day, I opened the document on my laptop and saw an angry old man’s face, bewildered and fuddling with the pages in front of him. Maybe I just feel like her parents! I just don’t understand what her problem is!? What is she going on about?
For a while, I developed a deep self-hatred towards my writing. I find the main character deeply unlikeable. I just don’t think I want to read a book where I don’t like the character. And basically towards myself. This is not necessarily uncommon in any artistic career, of course. Facing adversity, a moment of deep confusion and self-doubt, confronting people who just hate your work. Your mere existence irritates them on a level that has very little to do with the work and everything to do with their own wounds. While I did not give up, I also could not follow through. Instead, I pivoted and started writing plays eventually leading up to enrolling in a playwriting M.A. in Berlin. Yet I often wonder why I did not just give up after that experience. What kept me going?
I got my first diary when I was six years old. A Christmas gift from my sister; a small notebook bound in leather and red cloth, on the front image a drawing of a Japanese woman wearing a Kimono and an umbrella. I loved writing my little notes into it, my dreams and aspirations, when my siblings annoyed me or the whole world felt terrifying. It’s the place I started to contemplate death, pondered on who my true friends were, where I discussed my weekly changing crushes – a place of great relief, a place to know myself—writing if anything, has always been my great love.
So, the third lesson I teach my students is something that actually cannot be taught but something that has to be lived: to love writing no matter what. And as an anxiously attached person, I do not let go of love lightly.
A couple of days ago, I was invited to a podcast, and I found myself saying something like: “The most important thing when you’re writing is to be vulnerable, to know yourself, and to open up and share those things you believe to be true. Everything else is secondary. Of course, it’s also important to write well, to be concise and innovative, to develop a style, but ultimately to me, it is content over form. A text without any meaning, any risk of showing yourself is just decorative.” I still wonder if I actually mean that. Perhaps it is a little bit more complex than that. Perhaps what I meant to say was, that is where we start: a place of exploration and curiosity. Especially at the beginning of a career and that is where one most likely will join a writing workshop or enroll in a creative writing MFA. It is then I believe what needs to be ensured is that people have time to build confidence first, because there’s no point in pruning when you can’t actually distinguish between what’s a seedling and what’s a weed. They’ll all look the same.
Which leads me to the final and fourth lesson. If you can envision that one day, you will be a published writer, that there are people out there who will resonate with what you’re saying, don’t let anyone stop you. And even if you encounter people who will not like what you have to say, do not worry about it. As every writer knows: you might just write about it someday.
To learn more from Sophia, be sure to subscribe to her newsletter! She will also be a featured author in our April Write Together Retreat along side Elle Nash! The two will provide a craft chat on how they balance both the business and creative sides of their writing life, discussing Substack, social media, Patreon, and other ways, writers can develop ways to support their art. Sign up here!
Now: 13 Nonfiction Lit Mags With Open Theme Calls
These journals don’t only accept nonfiction, but the themes apply to them.
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