washington post personal essays

Be Heard: Where to Submit Essays Related to Current Events

June 5, 2020.

Hello, friends! As lovers and publishers of creative nonfiction we’re aware that, right now, it’s so important to express ourselves through words. As writers, putting pen to paper is how we move forward, either to help ourselves or others understand things more clearly or to speak the truth and influence change. While some might be journaling privately, others may be urgently submitting their stories to lit mags, websites, dailies, and more.

Hippocampus publishes our regular issues bi-monthly; as of today, that means our next issue is our July/August 2020 issue.

But… much of the work being created now needs to be heard NOW.

As we aren’t the right outlet for a timely piece, we wanted to point our readers/submitters to places where their submissions will get more immediate attention, whether literary magazines or outlets that publish personal essays more frequently, even daily, or to special calls for submissions, either for special issues or forthcoming anthologies.

Curated Lists of Opps from Our Friends Around the Web

Other publications and outlets have spent time creating lists and curating opps, so we’d like to link directly to their work:

• Submittable created a COVID-19 Creative Calls for Submission , which seems to be updated to add new content as they find it; multigenre.
• The New York Times article, “12 Ideas for Writing Through the Pandemic” includes some submission info
• We’ll continue to add to this list as we find resources or receive suggestions

Literary Magazines & Other Publications: Specific Calls

• COVID Lit – various genres/forms (rolling submissions)
• “For this issue, we want to examine the truths and the lies that we’re uncovering amid this global pandemic. With this call, we seek to elevate the already and the always, the ordinary and the overlooked.” — from the submission guidelines
• The Syndrome Magazine – Black Voices Matter – submissions from women/non-binary writers – deadline June 30
• Uncomfortable Revolution – seeking timely articles/stories on the intersection of pop culture, disability, race, and ethnicity. (rolling submissions)
• The HerStories Project – GenX women and impact of COVID-19 – June 30 deadline
• essays, poems, and art, “… that amplify the experiences of Black and African American writers in American society.” — from the guidelines
• “Art as resistance is not naïve or futile—it is bold and courageous. It embraces that which makes us human—our love, our anger, and our passion.” — from the guidelines
• Allegory Ridge – open to personal essays with the theme “Grow” (complete or pitch) – deadline June 12
• Vessel – op-eds (complete or pitch) – (rolling submissions)
• “…Queer Loving while also elevating Black and queer voices and creating a space of love, courage, and solidarity…” – from the guidelines
• PlanPhilly/WHYY – op-eds (Philadelphia-related) for the Eyes on the Street Section – (rolling submissions)
• Policy Network (based in Europe) – op-eds/articles for new series, Aftershock: Society and Politics After the Pandemic
• Longreads – current themes include Life in the Time of Covid and Amplify: Stories of Racism in America
• Entropy – new series, Food and COVID-19 (rolling submissions for now)
• T MI Project – COVID-related submisions (rolling submissions for now)

National Publications & Other Outlets: General Rolling Submissions

These publications traditionally accept personal essays, op-eds, and story pitches. (We linked to submissions pages where we could find them; others only list contact information.)

• How to submit an op-ed
• Inspired Life
• Boston Globe (essays, op-eds)
• General submissions
• Guardian Opinion
• Vox First Person
• Business Insider (op-eds and personal essays)
• HuffPost Personal
• Well + Good
• New York/The Cut
• Toward Freedom
• Various Outlets , the Op-Ed Project offers a database of papers and pubs that accept opinion submissions
• Medium publications , various – explore the many editorial publications at Medium that are open for submissions

Miscellaneous

Our suggestions are geared toward personal essays/literary CNF because that’s our main audience, but because we’re sharing this post on social media, we know a broader audience might see this. So we also wanted to include ideas for other ways to publish work/share your voice:

• An op-ed to your local or regional newspaper
• An op-ed to a local, independent online news publication
• A letter or story pitch to your alumni magazine or college publications (if they are publishing online during the summer)

If you’re working on something super-timely, we hope that this list of resources is helpful in finding your words a home. Hippocampus Magazine is always open to simultaneous submissions, so you may also submit work to us and withdraw it if it’s accepted elsewhere.

Special Note About Our July/August 2020 Issue

Right now, Hippocampus Magazine is selecting and finalizing pieces for the July/August issue. Typically, we have a 3-4 month lead time to review submissions, since we read pieces in the order that we receive them. However, given the gravity of the moment and the urgency and necessity of writing that reflects the world as it truly is, we plan to keep a close eye on more recent submissions as well.

(If you know of another opportunity not listed here, you can share it with us in the comments; we’ll try to update this post to add new suggestions, elevating them from the comments.)

P.S. Additional Opportunities (related, but longer-term deadlines)

While not timely in the sense of being published within the next few weeks, the following are related calls for submissions for magazines, special projects, and anthologies; we discovered them in our search and thought we should still share them here:

• 805 Lit + Art – special 19th Amendment/Black Women Issue (August 2020) – deadline June 7
• Flash Nonfiction COVID-19 : 73 Short, True Stories from the Front Lines of the Pandemic (publishes fall 2020) – deadline June 30
• CATALYST ( from Prevention at the Intersections, debut issue, Sept. 2020) – Mind, Body & Gender theme – deadline July 31
• Being Home: An Essay Anthology – Madville Publishing – deadline August 1
• About Place Journal – Works of Resistance, Resilience (for fall issue) – deadline August 1
• We’ll continue to add to this list as we spot opps or receive suggestions

IMAGE CREDIT: Flickr Creative Commins/ Pierre Metivier

Share a Comment Cancel reply

Contributor updates.

Alumni & Contributor Updates: Summer 2024

Alumni & Contributor Updates: Early 2024

Contributor Updates: Fall 2023

Contributor & Alumni Updates: Spring 2023

• Ethics & Leadership
• Fact-Checking
• Media Literacy
• The Craig Newmark Center
• Reporting & Editing
• Ethics & Trust
• Tech & Tools
• Business & Work
• Educators & Students
• Training Catalog
• Custom Teaching
• For ACES Members
• All Categories
• Broadcast & Visual Journalism
• Fact-Checking & Media Literacy
• Poynter ACES Introductory Certificate in Editing
• Poynter ACES Intermediate Certificate in Editing
• Ethics Training
• Ethics Articles
• Get Ethics Advice
• Fact-Checking Articles
• IFCN Grants
• International Fact-Checking Day
• Teen Fact-Checking Network
• International
• Media Literacy Training
• MediaWise Resources
• Ambassadors
• MediaWise in the News

Support responsible news and fact-based information today!

The Washington Post’s Inspired Life reports out viral feel-good stories

‘there's a million heartwarming things that go on in the world that we're not going to write about because they're just not that interesting.’.

You have the best job at The Washington Post.

That’s what readers sometimes email Sydney Page and Cathy Free, the full-time writers for the Post’s Inspired Life section, which documents human moments and acts of kindness. Along with editor Allison Klein, the team scours the internet for viral feel-good stories they can expand upon for the Post’s readership.

The stories they cover can be both touching and outrageous, like a story on a beloved emotional support alligator . Klein said an Inspired Life story has to be heartwarming and surprising.

“There’s a million heartwarming things that go on in the world that we’re not going to write about because they’re just not that interesting,” she said.

The readers, for their part, are responding well to that mission: Inspired Life stories are regularly some of the top-read articles on the site, Klein said. But it’s about more than metrics.

“Success is also when your neighbor comes over and says, ‘that was a great story,’” said Free, a longtime features writer who would sneak off the police beat at The Salt Lake Tribune to interview interesting people.

A lot of the stories in Inspired Life that are sourced through social media have already been told, to some extent, via viral TikTok explainers or local television news segments. Page and Free say the key to making these stories their own for the Post is to spend more time with them: asking questions no one else asked, gathering more voices, following an update, letting interviews run long and digging into conversations.

Inspired Life also stands out from competing “inspirational” content by not being overly cutesy, relying on the foundation of that reporting to tell the story as it is.

“It’s the same approach as any other journalism in the sense that you’re really not there to comment on something. You’re just highlighting what actually happened,” said Page, who worked at Canadian national news network CTV before joining the Post as an Inspired Life writer in 2020.

Outside of expanding on viral moments, a big part of the section is telling quiet stories that otherwise might not make headlines.

“A lot of these people, they never anticipated being in The Washington Post when they woke up that day,” Free said. “I think they make the best stories when they haven’t had a lot of attention and they’re ready to tell that story, and they haven’t really told it that often. You feel honored in a way to be the one to tell it.”

Klein, a former police beat reporter for the Post who originally joined the section as a writer, said the hard news that populates most of The Washington Post is critical, but can get hard to read.

“We have two wars and climate disasters and mass shootings and it gets to be a lot. I think what we do is show people everything is not terrible out there,” she said. “There’s a lot of bad stuff out there, but here’s a little bright spot. of something that actually happened, that is true, and it’ll make you feel not terrible about your day.”

Disaster coverage highlights how this reporting fits into the Post’s larger news product. The first day a hurricane hits, people want straight information on casualties and the impact of the storm. But on the second or third day, Klein said, people want survival stories and uplifting moments .

When going that route feels wrong, the team instead does what they call “counterprogramming,” running evergreen stories as a palate cleanser for the hard news product. But it goes beyond just balancing out bad things, Page said.

“You want to have a holistic picture of the world,” Page said. “Obviously there’s a lot of terrible things going on in the world, but there are good things. And if we just ignore all of those things, then we’re doing a disservice to our readers.”

Read Inspired Life’s favorite stories

Poynter asked the Inspired Life team to share some of their favorite stories from the section. Here are five of their picks.

• You’re stressed. Take a break and look at this tiny chipmunk restaurant. “Cathy wrote a story about this woman who made this little tiny chipmunk restaurant in her backyard and it was like, the cutest thing,” Klein said. “I was trying to figure out, what, how and when are we going to run this story? Because you have to figure out the right time to run it. Then the 2020 election came up and everyone was so tense that day, so we published it that day.”
• Tiny dolls appeared in mailbox with a note: ‘We’ve decided to live here’ “This mystery went on and on,” Free said of the sudden appearance of a family of dolls in the mailbox of Michigan resident Don Powell. “I love talking to him. He was a hoot. And he never figured out who it was.”
• This Polish city’s top tourist attraction? A stray cat. “Animal stories are really popular with people, and I love doing them,” Free said. “They always brighten everyone’s morning to read something like that.”
• The Nazis took a precious kettle from a Jewish couple. Some 86 years later, their grandson in Maryland got it back. “I just remember it being like a very emotional, powerful thing to write,” Page said. “I love that one.”
• Three women discovered they were dating the same man. They dumped him and went on a months-long road trip together. “All I knew was I had a first name,” Free said about tracking down the erstwhile boyfriend to confirm the women’s stories. “I knew he had worked at a bike shop in Boise. And so I call all the bike shops in Boise, and I caught a guy just as he was going home for the day, and he spilled his whole name and said, ‘I’ll have him call you.’ I didn’t think I’d hear from him, but he called and he gave me a quote. And he’s like, ‘Well, I didn’t like any of them.’”

Opinion | The truth is stranger (and funnier) than fiction as The Onion buys InfoWars

It’s the type of headline you might see from the satirical news site. And, this time, it’s entirely true.

What are Donald Trump’s second-term plans for the economy, immigration, abortion?

After Trump won the 2024 election, PolitiFact asked its readers to send us their questions about his campaign promises

Invest in your growth in 2025 by learning to lead with influence

This hallmark Poynter program teaches leaders without direct reports to harness their strengths.

Meet the 38 journalists chosen for Poynter’s 2024 Essential Skills for Rising Newsroom leaders

The participants will gain critical skills that new managers need to help forge successful paths to leadership

Opinion | Is Elon Musk already wearing out his welcome with Donald Trump?

One ‘insider’ told Politico, ‘Elon is getting a little big for his britches.’

Start your day informed and inspired.

Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you.

clock This article was published more than  10 years ago

How personal essays conquered journalism — and why they can’t cut it

“ My Life as a Little Person. ” “ I Still Dreamed of the Abuser I Once Thought of as My Father. ” “ My Startup Failed, and This Is What It Feels Like .” “ The Worst Day of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction .” “ I Understand Why Westerners Are Joining Jihadist Movements. I Was Almost One of Them .”

They’re everywhere these days: stories along the formula “I Am an X, and Y Happened to Me!” These kind of confessional articles long constituted the barbarians lurking around the gates of traditional newspaper culture, appearing on XOJane or blogs or niche columns like Modern Love, while the serious journalistic real estate remained dominated by authority figures like Larry Summers or Aaron David Miller pontificating on the economy or Israel-Palestine.

Now, though, they’re in the citadel. CNN has announced a new “First Person” project, a “series of personal essays exploring identity and personal points of view that shape who we are.” BuzzFeed has put out a call for first-person essays . This magazine, PostEverything , has excelled at the trend, promoting first-person takes from an undocumented immigrant who went to Harvard, a cop who advised civilians not to challenge him if they didn’t want to get hurt, and a Mercedes owner who found herself relying on food stamps. (I was schooled as a traditional political reporter, but I’ve written these pieces, too, musings on my experiences cooking and growing plants on a balcony .)

A New York Times editor told me his paper’s actively seeking more first-person essays — like “ Why I’m Jealous of My Dog’s [Health] Insurance ” — because “the reaction is great from readers.” “It used to be, ‘Let’s get a legislator who worked on gay rights,’” the editor went on. “But now we also say, ‘Let’s get someone who just got married! Let’s get somebody who has some unique personal attribute to talk about an issue.  Let’s get somebody who has an identity that gives them authority.’”

In certain obvious ways, the first-person essay boom is a great thing. It channels our deep mistrust of elites in the wake of the Iraq catastrophe and the financial crisis, both wrought by distant experts who had little direct experience of the things — dictatorship, subprime mortgages — they claimed to understand so well. Now we want the reverse: to hear from the people on the ground, to get points of view we imagine are so anchored in personal experience they must be true.

The New York Times op-ed editor called the trend “a radical democratization of opinion,” and in some respects it represents a great triumph of democracy, fulfilling the promise in the realm of literature that everyone’s life, from the failed entrepreneur to the cop to some random guy who envies his dog’s health insurance, is of equal interest and honor. Charles Blow, in a recent New York Times confessional about his ambiguous sexuality , wrote that his personal journey has led him to discover “there [is] no hierarchy of humanity. There [is] no one way to be, or even two, but many.” This captures how I feel after reading the best of the new wave of first-person op-eds: in awe at the tremendous variety of human experiences, of the myriad ways people find, amid pain, to be happy, to love each other and their world.

I also think the personal-essay boom reflects our uneasiness with the slashing of budgets for in-depth reporting and the necessarily more superficial coverage that results. An essayist giving a personal take on an event in the news — for instance, this heartbreaking piece of deep personal history on how delays in unwinding the Defense of Marriage Act traumatized a family — may not result from a month of reporting with a big budget, as in the older days, but instead brings a whole lifetime of experience to the story. “Everything’s so quick and fast it’s nice to have these personal pieces to pause in a deeper moment,” Rachel Levin, an editor at the news site Ozy who’s about to start a new section she calls “First-Person Fridays,” told me when I asked her why she loved the new first-person takes.

It surprised me a little, because it’s a journalistic truism that memoir is actually faster and easier to produce than reporting. But perhaps in our new age of instant news deadlines and dried-up travel budgets, plumbing the depths of your own life seems to be the only way to spend time on a topic, to take a breath and say something slower and more considered, to draw “reporting” from a wider time frame than this morning’s press conference.

*       *       *

Still, we lose something important in the rush toward first-person takes. First of all, while we have diversified the content on our opinion pages, the purveyors of the content fundamentally remain people who can write. Investigating the biographies of the first-person essay writers, I find most of them are journalists or writers of some sort, from the dwarf posting for CNN to the guy whose personal tragedy became a New York City tourist hotspot to the fellow jealous of his dog’s health care . So perhaps what we’re really seeing, with the so-called democratization of opinion, is how weird and variegated writers ’ lives actually are, rather than a profoundly widened window into human experience. From Homer onwards, it’s always been the duty of reporters to tell stories about the lives of those people who cannot spin great stories out of their own astonishing experiences. (This long profile of an illiterate Cairo garbageman does it gorgeously, for example.) We need our reporters to investigate the stories of these people just as much as we ever have.

The second fantasy perpetuated by the first-person essay boom is that people’s own account of their lives are always the most interesting accounts. With confessionals, we imagine we are getting closer to truth, as evidenced by Ozy’s alternate name for its “First-Person Fridays”: “True Story.”

But if that were really the case, there never would have been such things as biographies, travelogues, or even novels, which function on the premise that an unseen narrator understands more truth about the often self-deluded main characters than the characters themselves do. There would be no such thing as advice columns, or therapists. Reading the wave of first-person essays, I often wish the writers had an interlocutor visibly present in the piece, someone to ask more questions and provide an outside view.

Take this confessional by a cynical New York-based writer who has an unexpectedly transcendent experience in a tarot-card reader’s salon — and secretly becomes a tarot-card reader herself. Inevitably, it’s very funny, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much more fun and revealing it could have been if it had been written by a reporter who goes to the woman’s salon and probes a little deeper than she could probe herself on why, exactly, tarot was what enabled her to solve the kind of problems — difficulties with her career, an obsession with an ex — most of us flounder for lifetimes failing to fix. (Her answer: the tarot cards were “telling me a story about my life … I had been picking fights against everything in my life because I was dissatisfied.”)

Or look at it in the reverse. Consider one of the most brilliant short profiles published lately, of the disgraced former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili puttering around with baristas and bike messengers in Williamsburg trying to make himself feel hip and relevant again. The portrait was a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly vivid revelation of the torment and ennui of a small-nation leader lionized by the West as a democratizer and then roundly rejected by his own citizens. “Williamsburg is part of the democratic transformation,” he portentously proclaims to the reporter, who simultaneously shows him racing around a hipster food market in neon green sneakers bragging to anyone who will listen about “my friend, one of the biggest sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates” and buying 50 clocks made out of old books for “my presidential library.”

Now imagine if this had been a first-person essay, written by Saakashvili himself. It might have been titled, “How My Country Abandoned True Democracy and I Found It Again in Williamsburg.” It would have been ridiculous. All that sad and subtle truth, all the disconnect between how we imagine ourselves and who we really are — the disconnect that underpins the whole tragicomedy of human life — would have been lost. Sometimes the deepest truths are the ones we cannot ourselves quite face.

21 of my favorite personal essays I've written

I bare it all on the page (or at least, make it look like i have).

This is my newsletter about my life, interests, and work, including my books, writing, and classes. To show your support consider becoming a free or paid subscriber . For $5/month or $50/year, paid subscribers get access to my full archives. I hope you’ll also check out my Substack personal essay publication Open Secrets , which publishes an original essay every week.

One of the paradoxes of personal essays is that the author seems like they’re sharing every intimate detail about their lives relevant to the topic at hand. They’re taking readers into their minds and hearts and bedrooms and bathrooms and relationships. They’re confessing to misdeeds and flaws, often sharing things they haven’t told anyone (or very few people) in their private lives. The reader feels like they’re privvy to something special, and likely, they probably are.

Yet, of course, instead of literally sharing everything they were doing and thinking and feeling, essayists are always making choices about what to include and exclude, about how far to let the reader in, and where to shut that door and draw a little space around themself for privacy. It’s a line I walk every time I write an essay, and when I wrote my sex columns for The Village Voice and Philadelphia City Paper and The Frisky, and when I wrote about my dad’s alcoholism for Parade magazine when I was in college, and even now, when I post on social media. Because whereas my life has been pretty much an open book for over 30 years, since I was a teenager, that’s not the case for my partner, my family members, or many of my friends. I take their privacy seriously, while also being a fierce advocate for my own right to write what’s in my heart and mind.

Thanks for reading Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’m thinking about all of these issues as I prepare to launch my personal essay publication and Substack newsletter, Open Secrets . We launch Monday, April 3, and I’m so proud and excited to bring you a brand new essay every week, through at least September 2023 (I will run it indefinitely if I get enough paying subscribers to pay authors; I pay $100/essay on acceptance). I hope you’ll subscribe; there are free and paid options.

So today I’m going to share 20 of my favorite personal essays I’ve written. I’ve included links save for two that are offline because The Kernel and Lemondrop are no longer publishing; I’ll share them in full in my newsletter soon.

It’s been a doozy of a week and it’s only Wednesday, so I’m just sharing the links and snippets, but soon I’ll be detailing the backstory and inspiration for some of these essays and tips about how I sold them, for paying subscribers. So without further ado, 21 of my favorite personal essays about everything from hoarding to being an introvert to dating and finances and kink and jealousy and giggle incontinence (a term I learned from a reader after publishing) more.

HuffPost Personal, “ The First Time I Peed On My Boyfriend’s Floor, I Was Mortified. Then It Kept Happening. ”

Salon, “ I’m a sex writer with a secret shame -- hoarding ”

HuffPost Personal, “ Want To Know Why People Stockpile Toilet Paper? I'm A Hoarder And I Have A Few Ideas. ”

Refinery29, “ The Beauty Of Not Sleeping Together ” - my essay on sleeping in separate bedrooms

Washington Post , “ I love my boyfriend, but I never want to get married ”

SELF , “ I Suddenly Stopped Being Kinky and I’m Not Sure Why ”

Shondaland, “ Why I Turned Down a Hoarding Reality Show ”

The Girlfriend, “ I Became An Introvert In My 40s ”

Jezebel, “ Loving My Body—Kinda, Sorta, Sometimes ”

Salon, “ Baby talk ”

The Independent, “ Kim and Kanye’s kids deserve better than this ”

Business Insider, “ After a friend my age died on my birthday, I bought life insurance — and even though my family said I shouldn't, I don't regret it ”

Redbook, “ Why My Boyfriend of 5 Years and I Only Have 5 Photos of the Two of Us Together ”

The Goods, “ The best $2,000 I ever spent: many, many rounds of bingo ”

YouBeauty, “ What I’ve Learned About Size and Body Image by Dating a Fat Man ”

TueNight, “ What I Learned From My Stalker ”

BuzzFeed, “ Why I’m Jealous of My Friend’s Unplanned Pregnancy ”

The San Francisco Chronicle , " Nurturing Is Part of Fatherhood " (my very first essay published when I was 19)

The Toast, “ You Can Have Too Many Books ”

The Kernel, “ I'm addicted to Google News Alerts ”

Here’s the opening few paragraphs:

“Your Google alert on Paris Hilton just went off,” my boyfriend recently sneered at me, handing me my iPhone with disgust.

His reaction wasn’t so much about my following a star whose gossip currency has long since depreciated. He would have had the same reaction if the alert had been for “Carrie Brownstein,” “porn star,” “schadenfreude,” or “frosting”—all of which I have alerts for, along with 9,995 others. I would have even more, but Google only allows users a maximum of 10,000 alerts. No topic is too big (sex), too small (Serenity Prayer) or too odd (high fructose corn syrup) to pique my interest.

His repulsion was centered around the fact that in any given hour, I will likely receive at least a handful of such emails, which light up my phone in a way that would make a casual bystander think I’m popular. I’m not, but my inbox certainly is. In the last half hour, from 9 to 10 pm on a Thursday evening, I’ve received 26 alerts. I’ve learned such random factoids as: There’s a Bob’s Burgers -themed animated Sleater-Kinney video , Kelly Brook’s cleavage was “hard to miss,” and Virgin America had a good fourth quarter . None of them were of any particular urgency or relevance to my life (though the video amused me), but I still welcomed the information, because I don’t believe one can ever possess, in a literal sense, “too much” information.

Lemondrop, “ Why I Got the Word ‘Open’ Tattooed On My Back ”

Here’s the opening:

I'd always thought that I wasn't a tattoo person. There wasn't a single image I felt I had to have on my body. But when my friend Sheela and a bunch of other cool ladies I know made plans to get tattoos while we were all in Chicago, I decided I wanted in on the action. I still couldn't come up with an image that worked for me, until I realized that I'm not a visual person so much as a word person. As a writer, words are what matter most to me; I stay up late at night reading, not watching TV. I remember quotes and song lyrics more than I remember movie scenes. Once I decided I wanted a word, the one that came to mind was "open." I tend to be extremely pessimistic, and when something goes wrong in my life, instead of trying to fix it or make it better, I assume there's something wrong with me and that's why the problem is occurring. This is especially the case with relationships. If someone breaks up with me, as happened in May, or just decides to stop talking to me altogether, I wonder not only what I did to cause them to not want me anymore, but I assume that other people I might date will also treat me that way. It's a vicious cycle, and one I'd like to break.

__________________________________________________________________________

Want to learn how to write and sell your own personal essays? Join me for my next Essay Writing 101 Zoom class , which is limited to 20 people. We will discuss what makes a powerful personal essay, write to prompts for six different types of essays and analyze examples of them, and cover how to submit essays to editors and how much you can earn, typically about $100 (what I pay for Open Secrets ) to $1,000.

Essay Writing 101 class registrants also receive access to my private list of 50+ current essay markets with links to writing guidelines and editors to submit to, plus my commentary and advice on how to better your chances and have early and extended access to submitting essays to Open Secrets. After class, Essay Writing 101 alumni will receive an invitation to a private Slack channel where you can continue the conversations, share writing questions and news, and form a community with fellow essay writers. I will also share updates in the Slack channel about newly published essays to study and essay writing news.

Have questions about the class? Comment here or email me at mail at rachelkramerbussel.com with “Essay class” in the subject line and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

What are students saying about my Essay Writing 101 class?

Praise for Essay Writing 101:

“If you’re thinking about writing essays, Rachel Kramer Bussel’s essay class will give you the courage, the confidence and the know-how to start pitching. She brings a wealth of knowledge, resources and tips in a compact two-hour session, filled with prompts to start the writing process. Highly recommended.” — Suzanne Jefferies

“ I have attended many creative nonfiction and essay writing workshops since 2020, and the one I took with Rachel Kramer Bussel is above and beyond the best I have been to. During the session, she offered personalized responses that carefully considered each of her students as serious writers and gave me the confidence to get even more stuff out into the world.

She balanced both the complexities of publishing with the intricacies of craft. The two-hour workshop helped us create new essays, edit ones in the works and send them to the world. Rachel is also a working writer who knows the ins and out of the industry, and her insight is unique, thoughtful, practical, and inspiring. So if you want to empower your words on the page, you better attend the next one.” — Gretchen Comcowich

“Here’s what I especially appreciated about the class: your coaching style that is listening for all the clues of what folks are saying and your uncanny ability to speak directly into anyone’s personal essay ideas. You had suggestions for publications, for other essays or pubs to read that were similarly themed, the suggestion of placement associated with holidays or dates.” — Teri McCormick Hinton

“Rachel shares terrific information and ideas with writers in her essay workshop. Her prompts lead in unexpected directions, and her thoughtful feedback provides new ways to structure and publish material. This workshop is highly recommended for both novice and experienced essayists.”   — Stella Fosse , author of Aphrodite’s Pen: The Power of Writing Erotica after Midlife

“Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Essay Writing 101 packs a lot of valuable information into a relatively short class! Thanks to thought-provoking writing prompts, insightful feedback from Rachel, a wealth of resources, and an inspiring group dynamic, I left this workshop with several potential topics and angles for essays and ideas about where I could pitch them. I feel more confident than ever to start submitting!” — Angie Reiber

“I took Rachel’s Essay Writing class to explore my creative side that had been long asleep. The class not only awoke my desire to write, but it opened up so many parts of my own personal story that I didn’t know were hidden there! Rachel is so supportive in her guidance and so generous with tips, structure and prompts. I highly recommend working with Rachel!” — Ati Egas

“Both of Rachel’s Erotic Writing and Essay Writing 101 classes were incredibly inspiring, informative, helpful and encouraging. The writing prompts given were very unique and fun, firing a creative writing process that has continued well after class. Rachel was incredibly supportive when students read aloud, giving excellent ideas, feedback and asked great questions to promote the process.  After class, Rachel’s emails have been full of incredibly useful information on publishing, insight and additional information that has been immensely helpful.” — Candice Leigh

Essay Writing 101 class details and registration here

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?