Max Talley
Improving & Submitting Your Writing
Monday-Friday
1-3:30 PMTerrace III
Sharpen your writing skills to increase your chances of getting acceptances from literary magazines, online journals, and book editors at publishing companies. Over five sessions, author and editor Max Talley shows how to give your submissions a fighting chance at publication, while avoiding pitfalls that lead to instant rejection.
You’ll learn how to draft a “do no harm” cover letter that addresses the correct person and includes a brief bio. We explore the benefits of simultaneous submissions, targeting your writing to the correct markets, reworking your piece after ten rejections, and joining a writers’ group to gain feedback from people outside of friends and family. We also review manuscript formatting rules and learn how to submit work through online portals like Submittable and Duotrope.
Most important, we engage in supportive group critiques of the first three pages of participants’ stories, novels, creative nonfiction and essays, with the goal of ensuring that an editor keeps reading.
You’ll come away with an improved draft of an existing piece plus the know-how and assurance to submit it for publication.
This program is open to writers of all levels. Whether you are writing short stories, creative nonfiction, essays, or novels, getting short pieces published in literary magazines is an essential part of platform building for an author. It is also a way potential agents and editors will gauge your experience level.
Bio
Max Talley has had seventy stories or essays published since 2015. His writing has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, About Place, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Saturday Evening Post. Talley's third short story collection, Destroy Me Gently, Please, was published by Serving House Books, his hippie crime novel, Peace, Love, & Haight, launched last fall, and his hardboiled thriller, Santa Fe Psychosis, was expanded and republished this spring by Lazarus Media.
