Dennis Sweeney Gives Great Advice to Writers in 'How to Submit'

Author, poet, and teacher, Dennis James Sweeney, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss his essential guidebook for aspiring authors titled How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses. In his book, prospective writers can find a myriad of tools and resources to assist them on the road to publication. He said, “A lot of people come to wanting to submit and publishing their writing with a sense of, ok I need to figure out how this works and I need to do it… and so I try to give people advice about stuff like finding where to submit, using the resources that are out there, constructing a cover letter, being strategic about how they send out their submissions and things like that… but, there’s also this other aspect to it which is the difficult, vulnerable work of… putting your work out there and of it trying to connect with people… So there’s this manifesto for the wonderfulness of these particular publishing communities and then there’s, hey, I’m going to give you a lot of logistical advice alongside that too, and hopefully they can complement each other and make it a little easier for people to enjoy it and do it successfully.”

While the process can feel daunting and dismaying at times, Sweeney encourages his readers to keep pressing on and enjoy the journey no matter how challenging it may be. “The most important advice I would give is to know that it happens slowly and it’s a life practice… we think like the writing is something you devote yourself to, you spend tons of years doing it, and then you get published… and that’s not how it works, at least for me. Publishing is something that takes a really long time to figure out your relationship to it and it takes a really long time, especially, to know the landscape… Everyday you go back to it even in the face of the longness of the journey is a reminder that the journey itself is the purpose… You know you’ll find a solution and a home for your writing that you probably didn’t even imagine before, and it’ll be good.”