Submission Guidelines

Welcome to our magazine! We’re glad you are considering the possibility of submitting a story to our journal.

We want to make this magazine a place where people feel safe to tell their stories. Hence, we have a few guidelines we need to follow to preserve the safety of this place and to try to make sure that the writing of these stories and the reading of these stories will be valuable and helpful for our group.

1. When submitting a story to our editors, you need to provide your name. However, if you wish the story to appear anonymously, that’s fine. But our editors need to know whom to contact if questions or worries arise.



2. Your story can be short or long. If it’s really long, chances are that you may not get as many readers, but that’s your choice.



3. Your stories can be presented in a variety of formats. You can make your piece a straightforward autobiographical account. You can set up dialogues. You can tell your story in verse (and it doesn’t have to rhyme). You are free to use your creativity.



4. One basic requirement is that you submit your story. Now this gets a little tricky, for what do we mean by “your story”? Initially this means something that has happened to you, something you have experienced, something you are going through. What if you want to tell a story involving a family member or the story of a friend through your eyes? That’s fine; it’s still your story insofar as you are involved in it. The magazine is not a place for fiction; the stories need to be “true.” But what does this mean, for we realize that the best fictional storytelling is “true” in a very deep sense? We just ask that the stories not be fiction in the ordinary sense. Be that as it may, you can “disguise” your story by changing names and places to preserve anonymity or to protect other people, but the essence of the story is “true. The reason for all this is that it is in telling our own stories that we are most able to keep track of our lives and find out who we are.



5. Some content guidelines: We want this magazine to be a place to tell stories that are important to you in your efforts to become a human being. The magazine is not a place to gossip, to get revenge, to bitch and complain, to embarrass others, to exploit others. However, the magazine is a place where stories of hurt, sorrow, anger and injustice do have an important place. The magazine is not to be a forum for one’s political ideology; we’re not here to discuss “issues.” We are here to listen to people’s particular stories, and some of those stories may then have social or political implications, but the implications are not primary. Stories of injury, assault and abuse also have their place here as a possible vehicle of healing and sharing.
   
   Our magazine is new, and thus an experiment. These guidelines serve as a starting point. As the magazine grows and evolves, these guidelines may change. But for now, these will help us get started.
   
   Cathy Martyn, editor
   Jim Allis, Faculty Advisor
   

Email your submission: awakening@hope.edu

Writing tips from some well-known authors:

Lament For a Son- Nicholas Wolterstorff

“Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than the words.”

“Not even the best of words can take away the pain. What words can do is testify that there is more than pain in our journey on earth to a new day.” (34)

Bird by Bird-Anne Lamott

“I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller. But I don’t. [Writing] is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it. And often the right words do come, and you—well—“write” for a while; you put a lot of thoughts down on paper.” (8)

“Take the attitude that what you are thinking and feeling is valuable stuff, and then be naïve enough to get it all down on paper.” (113)

“So why does our writing matter, again?’ they ask. Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life,our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.” (237)

Telling Secrets-Fredrick Buechner

“I have called this book Telling Secrets because I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very tilling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about. Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell.” (2-3)

“But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.” (30)