Erika Dreifus

Oh, What a Time

One week ago, I left New York City aboard a Boston-bound Amtrak train. Final destination: my 25th college reunion.

The days that followed were amazing, filled with too many highlights to recount here. But I thought you’d appreciate a glimpse of the literary output produced by the Class of 1991.

Some public thanks are due to my classmate Liz Brown for organizing a delightful book party on Thursday evening, where author-classmates sold and signed their books. (Including a bunch of copies of Quiet Americans, which was extremely gratifying.)

If you’re interested in knowing more about our collective class “library,” you can check out this list, which complemented the event. I suspect that you’ll see at least a few familiar names and titles. 😉

While I Was Away

Last Friday, Beyond Your Blog featured an “old” blog post of mine on that ever-pesky issue of submission fees. And someone read it!

Actually, at least two “someones” read it, as I discovered when I received this message yesterday. (I’m re-publishing it with permission.)

Erika,

Just wanted to let you know that a colleague and I are collecting submissions for an anthology and actually changed our position on readers fee after reading your post about it (saw your article on the Beyond Your Blog Facebook page). We run an online literary magazine based on our method of writing non-fiction in short, 10-minute bursts and we’re producing our first anthology. We have never charged a fee for submitting to the website but reluctantly established a fee for submitting to the anthology to pay our readers and to help cover up-front printing. But we liked what you had to say so much that we eliminated the fee, and we will be refunding the money of those who have already submitted. Just thought you might like to know!

You still won’t want to share our anthology because we can’t afford to pay writers for the first one, though we hope to in the future. But at least they can now submit for free! If you’re interested in checking it out, here it is. http://www.lifein10minutes.com/anthology/

Thanks!
Sarah Allen-Short
Life in 10 Minutes
www.lifein10minutes.com

Sarah is correct—to an extent: I won’t include the anthology call in my usual “Monday Markets” posts or in the newsletter. But I’m willing to share it here.

Further Explanation

In part, I’m willing to do so because Sarah wrote me such a nice note!

But Sarah also happened to reach me moments after I’d submitted a poem of my own to another non-paying anthology (that project’s theme won me over, which, as I mentioned in the original blog post, is sometimes the case). Sarah’s message therefore seemed to resonate with my own practice.

As for that new submission of mine, well, it’s queued up on Submittable. You all know that drill! I’ll keep you posted!