Blog Submission Guidelines

While Brevity (our flagship magazine) publishes the finest examples of flash nonfiction we can find, the Brevity Blog is the place to discuss issues related to the writing of creative nonfiction. The blog, like the magazine, reaches thousands of readers each month, with 50,000+ WordPress subscribers.

Though we don’t shy away from important issues in the writing community, the Brevity blog can also be colloquial, personal, and at times irreverent or humorous, and our most popular posts tend to be those that are the least academic. We aim to publish not just blog posts but essays, with a beginning, a middle and an ending, with the arc and movement found in all good essays, and in which the writer comes to a recognition, a realization, or sometimes an epiphany. We look for that throughline and a reader take away that questions, teaches, inspires, and/or entertains—that makes us think.

Appropriate topics for the Blog include the craft of writing nonfiction, issues in editing and publishing, writing conference and creative writing classroom experiences, interviews with writers or editors, prompts, close readings of essays or essayists, or specific issues that challenge us as we attempt to capture true experiences on the page. You can read a discussion of the blog posts that work best for us here.

Please note:

• We are looking for essays grounded in specific experiences of writing, with a useful takeaway for our readers. Or to put it another way, we are less interested in “Here is how I feel about writing” and far more excited to see submissions saying “Here’s what you can do with your writing based on what I’ve learned in my own process.”
• We no longer publish book reviews, but we welcome craft-focused interviews with authors about their book/process, or author-submitted examinations of writing or publishing issues that intersect with the recently published or forthcoming book. For these submissions, please query first. When submitting, please include the book cover as well as the book author’s headshot.

We customarily schedule blog posts 30 to 60 days out, so if you are writing in reference to a particular holiday or date, please plan ahead.

Please keep your blog submissions in the 500 to 1,000 word range (our sweet spot is 850). Blog submissions should:

• Be attached as a Word document. [Please use your last name as the first word of the file name, like this: SMITH My Writing Story.doc]
• Be formatted as seen on the blog (single space, no indentation, one extra space between paragraphs).
• Include an author bio, and if applicable the interviewer’s bio, in the same Word document as your blog essay.
• Include an author headshot as a jpg attached to your email. Please send a vertical-orientation headshot.

Blog submissions can be sent to brevityblogessays (insert @ symbol) gmail.com. Response time is typically 1-4 weeks.

We are not able to pay for blog posts.

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AI-generated work. We do not accept submissions of AI-generated work, which includes any writing that was created, partially or entirely, with AI software. If a submission is sent to us claiming to be author work but then discovered or identified as AI-generated, it will be rejected and the author no longer welcome to submit in the future. We reserve the right to withdraw acceptances from any work found to be AI-generated, even if after publication. Exceptions are possible for work that deliberately explores the use of the rapidly-evolving AI technology, but only if the author is transparent about the use of AI when submitting.

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We also are happy to announce contests, calls for submissions, residency and conference information, but please follow these guidelines:

• We cannot rewrite your poster or flyer into a prose announcement. You must send a prose announcement, formatted and ready to publish.
• The blog’s readers are not looking for pure advertising: if you wish folks to enter your contest, submit to your magazine, or consider attending your residency or conference, give us some insight into the sorts of nonfiction your editors favor, or into the editing process, or the ways in which your organization features nonfiction, or the philosophy of your contest judges or conference faculty. In other words, our readers like to learn, rather than just being told “patronize us.”
• Perhaps someone on your staff could do a brief interview with the director, editor, past contest winner, judge?

Keep information and announcements in the 250 to 850 word range, please, and send them to brevityblogessays (insert @ symbol) gmail.com