April Showers Bring May Literary Magazines
NewPages Newsletter #124 Featuring 44 Submission Opportunities & Upcoming Events
How are we at the final full week of April already? This just doesn’t seem right. Of course, the older we get, the more time flies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean we are having fun while it does. Mother Nature is being fickle and cruel. My dwarf fruit cocktail trees are finally getting blossoms on them, and she decides to hand us below freezing temps and frost. Bah humbug. I would trade our 60+ gorgeous weather in February right now to keep my little trees blossoming and happy.
Since May is right around the corner next week, it’s the perfect time to check out our Big List of Writing Contests to see who has deadlines next month. Also, with summer also soon to be upon us, now is a great time to also start looking at our Guide to Indie Bookstores in the US and Canada so you can enjoy checking them out if you plan on traveling this summer. One of the things on my bucket list is to do a bookstore tour around my home state of Michigan. There’s something so magical about a bookstore, especially the passionate people who run them and also offer so much to their local communities.
Since April is ending next week, that means application, submission, and contest deadlines are approaching! April 30 is the deadline to apply to attend the Tremont Writers Conference taking place in the Smoky Mountains in October, the deadline to submit work to the next issue of The Pensieve, and the extended deadline to enter Passager’s contest for writers over 50.
If you are a new subscriber or somehow missed out on it, the April eLitPak was emailed last Wednesday and featured 15 submission opportunities, upcoming events, and new titles and issues to sink your teeth into.
The Magazine Stand features the latest issues of literary and alternative magazines. Issue 57.1 of Southern Humanities Review invites readers to walk, wonder, and wander: from an essay featuring “Murder Walks” to a poem asking “In Paintings of Motherhood, Why Are the Children Always Young?” to a story about “The Wandering Gringo” trying desperately to learn Mexico City.
Coming later this week, you can learn more about Broadsided’s Spring 2024 issue. This new folio dances over and along the deep emotions and, in many cases, sorrows held in the poems. Isn’t that the essence of spring? Meanwhile, the Spring 2024 issue of Cool Beans Lit showcases the writing and art of creators expressing their stunning views of nature, technology, magical realism and even mathematics.
Kaleidoscope’s Episode 6 podcast focuses on selections from Issue 88 of their journal and is focused on lifting the words directly from the pages of the publication to deliver them to an audience through a new perspective. With its May 2024 issue, World Literature Today showcases Buenos Aires, Argentina, in a cover feature that gathers nine porteño writers, guest-edited by Kit Maude.
Looking for a good book of poetry? Stephen C. Pollock’s Exits: Selected Poems explores the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the potential for renewal. This is a perfect title for spring reading.
Need even more book recommendations? Enjoy hearing from our reviewers. Kevin Brown gives his thoughts on Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley. While the title is clear that the focus of the book is on grief, her focus is the grief for the loss of one person. “This description makes the book sound depressing and heavy, and it certainly is, but Crosley brings her typical humor to the subject, as well, though much of it is gallows humor.”
Susan Kay Anderson reviews 2023 Halcyon Poetry Award Winner The Verdant by Linda Russo. This collection “goes beyond usual eco-poetics to explore what it means to utter human sounds in wild places.”
Come back to the NewPages Blog later this week to find a reviews of Teach for Climate Justice by Tom Roderick, There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib, and Splinters by Leslie Jamison.
As a writer, do you keep file folders and notebooks filled with all of your work? I am sure there are ones that mortify you, that you know could be better, and maybe some you just want to throw in the trash.
It’s a painful exercise, but sometimes spring cleaning is a must, isn’t it? Not to throw things away completely, but time for renewal and revisiting. Go through your proverbial drawers, shake the skeletons out of your closet and see if anything gives you new insights, new lights.
What is interesting, is as much as we should, we can always write things that don’t necessarily come from past experiences. Back in my college days, I wrote a poem about a loved one dying at home. There was a purpose to it, I think it corresponded with the death of my great grandmother, but it wasn’t actually a lived experience. Fast forward 10+ years later and it actually became a lived experience with my grandmother passing away at home. Rereading that poem hit hard. It also hit that it needed some serious TLC to fully make it ready for the world.
While it can be painful at times, let’s gather inspiration from the past to help shape our writing futures.
Calls, Contests, & More
Below are this week’s writing contests, calls for submissions, and literary and writing events. Enjoy 44 opportunities to get your work published or to enhance your writing craft. Please note: only paid subscribers get access to this information! You can become a paid subscriber for only $5 a month and get early access to submission opportunities and events before they go live on our site.
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