Book in Progress, Part 6: I Believe in My Book
by Joe Taylor To be brutally honest, it's been worse than brutal. It's been silent. A month after Labor Day, when I thought my responses from prospective agents might pick…
Review of Dead Letters: Delivering Unopened Mail from a Pennsylvania Ghost Town
Byron Hoot reviews author Jess Weible's new publication, Dead Letters: Delivering Unopened Mail from a Pennsylvania Ghost Town What Fragile Hope Dies ... ? Imagine being given a letter written…
Image by Greg Clary
Submitting to The Watershed Journal, an Inclusive Literary Magazine
Inclusive, authentic, diverse storytelling Got some work you'd like to submit to The Watershed Journal literary magazine? Check out this overview of our magazine production cycle to learn more about…
Should You Strive To Be A “Prolific” Writer?
by writer Patricia Thrushart The words ‘prolific’ and ‘writer’ are used together as often as ‘rough’ and ‘draft' or ‘copy’ and ‘editor.’ The assumption is that writing a lot is…
Letter From the Editors (Summer 2020 Edition)
Cover image by Featured Artist Madison Gasper The 2020 Summer Edition of The Watershed Journal is a product of a particularly challenging time. Globally, the pandemic made choices that used…
Preparing for a Literary Agent – Book in Progress, Part 5
My first couple of days of submitting to agents were exhausting and extremely frustrating. I would identify a target agent then send her (90% are women) whatever she requested. About a quarter of them came back immediately as undeliverable. Thinking, I guess, that "this agent was my only hope" I'd keep trying to find a better email address or resending it. Finally, I realized she may be out of business or posted a bad address and moved on.
Enacting the Edits: Book in Progress, Part 4
Surgeons have often been accused of being emotionally removed from the patient they're operating on, removing 'this' and 'rewiring' that. I could relate to that as I performed literary 'surgery'…
The System is Broken: Using Dissonance to Engage an Audience
Engaging and engrossing writing can be simple or complicated, but never flat. Just as in real life, we can incorporate adversity and differences, rather than avoid them, in order to build a system that feels real and moves our readers. Even when our goal is to find patterns, draw conclusions or describe a beautiful future, our stories are more powerful when we consider the exceptions to the rules we create. Introducing dissonance into our writing invites our readers to bring themselves into the story and empowers them to take our narratives personally.
Decolonize Your Bookshelf: A Call to Action for White Writers and Readers
The mindfulness with which we engage with literature is crucial to creating, deconstructing, and recreating our worldview as we move through life. How do our cultural blindspots influence the stories we tell?
An English Teacher’s Guide for What Makes Writing “Good” and What To Do If It Isn’t
That’s why, several years into my teaching career, I laid down the Red Pen, thanks to some good advice from a colleague, and changed the way I looked at writing instruction entirely. I had to stop working for my students as their copy-editor. Neither of us wanted me to do that job in the first place. In other words, instead of tearing the writing apart, I had to focus on developing what was already there. If I was going to evaluate someone’s writing, it was just as important for me to identify strengths as it was to identify weaknesses. Maybe even more so.