The End of Knowing, Open Submission Call, and What We Published Last Month
Write or Die Magazine Updates: May 2025
Each month, you will receive this special newsletter with a recap of what our magazine published the month prior and what our editors have been up to. If you are new here, this is a different newsletter from the one we send out weekly about our writing workshops. Keep scrolling for more! <3
A Note from the EIC
Hey writers,
I don’t know about you, but when summertime rolls around, my writing routine tends to take a bit of a backseat. Maybe it’s because I live in New England, where summers are precious, and I feel the need to make the most of every sunny day. Or maybe it’s that we humans are cyclical, and this is a season that brings me more pause than others. I need that reset before diving into another big project. My writing partner, Tamar and I feel the same about the summer months and have discussed beginning our second novels in September. We have accepted this part of ourselves, that now is the time to slow down. In that acceptance, I’ve found great joy. There is no “I should” or guilt. There is just trust in my writerly self that I will get to the work when my mind and body are ready for it. Your writing life can be however you want it to be!
What does the summer bring to your creative process? What are you accepting about yourself lately?
Happy writing (or not!).
<3
Kailey, EIC
P.S. Something I am doing this summer is one-on-one mentorship! If you are looking for support for your novel, whether that’s getting started and planting a seed, reworking a messy draft, or preparing to query, I’m here for you!
Write or Die’s First Ever Fiction Contest — Have you submitted yet?!
🖤 General Submission Window 🖤
May 1 – July 1, 2025
🏆 Prizes 🏆
1st Place: $1000
2nd Place: $400
3rd Place: $200
Winning stories will be published in Write or Die Magazine.
💗 Guest Judge 💗
Nora Lange's debut novel Us Fools was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize by the Academy of Arts and Letters, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, was named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her short writing is forthcoming in the Believer, has appeared in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGIANT and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family and desperately misses Los Angeles.
👀 What She is Looking For 👀
Shock yourself. Take a risk. Loosen the reins of plot. Let the idea in your story shine. Get lost and call it found.
The End of Knowing by Haley Swanson
As a nonfiction writer, I felt trapped by a responsibility to “tell the truth”. If I simply relayed an experience exactly as it happened in life, I would be rewarded with whatever meaning had eluded me in real time (because isn’t that always how the story goes? That all we have to do is write, and our truest selves will be revealed?)
Instead, my unspoken promise to “the truth” always led me to the same narrative and emotional dead ends. I didn’t understand the events I was writing about; that’s why I was writing about them! And contrary to any Pinterest quote, putting them on the page wasn’t leading me to any previously uncovered insights for myself, let alone resonance for my imagined reader.
(Sorry to disappoint any diehard Little Women fans who think coming to terms with a sister’s death is as simple as locking oneself away in an attic and somehow managing to swap out food and sleep with writing nonstop for weeks.)
I threw my hands in the air. Fine, I decided, I didn’t know anything about anything. From then on, I was going to stop thinking so hard about what happened and think only about what didn’t happen, and why, and how I felt about it.
And then—I couldn’t stop! I really could skip meals and bedtimes and keep going and going and going about everything that was unknowable to me. In fact, I found those questions to be more “true” than anything I had purported to understand before. I remembered that the act of asking is what made me a writer, not fabricating answers.
In an author’s note opening her latest book, Festival Days, essayist Jo Ann Beard explains that two of the collection’s pieces “were first published as stories. They are also essays, in their own secret ways, and the essays are also stories.”
In a 2018 Q&A with Electric Literature, Carmen Maria Machado said of her then work-in-progress memoir, In the Dream House:
“I have fictional sections that use tropes as extended metaphors. As I was writing the first draft of this book, I kept thinking, ‘Am I allowed to do this?’”
The answer is a resounding yes. Our job as nonfiction writers is not to relay events beat for beat no matter what, but instead to strive for unflinching honesty in our inevitable, universal, essential speculations concerning real and therefore inherently unknowable life experiences.
Think about your essay’s narrative and emotional dead ends. Back them up two, maybe three steps, and ask yourself: Do I actually know what happened next?
6-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Speculative Nonfiction
with Haley Swanson | Wednesdays, July 9th through August 13th | 8–10 PM EST | $495
Application deadline: June 25
In this six-week speculative nonfiction workshop, we’ll engage with memoirs, poems, and essays that play with the “what if” of things. Readings will include selections from Jo Ann Beard’s Festival Days, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Laura Kasischke’s “Bike Ride with Older Boys,” among others.
How do these writers speculate on what could’ve been—in relation to events, time, and past selves?
How does this strengthen their narrative conceits?
How can we implement these tools in our own essays?
We’ll also engage on this level with each other’s work. Each student will workshop one essay they either feel needs to engage with speculation or is currently asking these impossible questions. Writers will leave this class with a deeper understanding of how to employ speculative nonfiction tools in their work as well as written and verbal feedback from peers and the instructor on an essay draft of their choosing.
Also enrolling…see what’s happening this week!
ᯓ★ Wednesday, June 11 — Outline Your Entire Book Series from Start to Finish with Hannah Kate Kelley
ᯓ★ Thursday, June 12 — Editing Your Work Like a Reader: Tangible Tactics to Tackle Plot and Strengthen Language with Michelle Kicherer
ᯓ★ Sunday, June 15 — It's Giving Body: Writing About the Bodies We Call Home with Mathangi Subramanian
Essays
Thinking About Egg Salad While Listening to Auden by Ann Levin
Published: May 28
Lists are powerful. Once you write something down, you don’t have to think about it anymore.
Author Interviews
In May, we published interviews with:
Daisy Atterbury: On Negotiating Boundaries, Experimental Writing, Lucy Lippard, and Their Debut Collection ‘The Kármán Line’
Marisa Crane: On Basketball as Performance, the Dark Side of Perfectionism, the Jock-to-Writer Pipeline, and Their New Book ‘A Sharp Endless Need’
Vauhini Vara: On AI’s Place in Literature, Writing into the Zeitgeist, and Her Newest Book ‘Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age’
Keetje Kuipers: On Fluctuating Value, the Gift of Time, Strap-Ons,and Her New Poetry Collection ‘Lonely Women Make Good Lovers’
Paula Bomer: On the Art of the Character Study, Writing Into Uncomfortable Truths, Embracing the Untraditional, and Her Latest Novel ‘The Stalker’
Nicole Cuffy: On the Allure of Cults, the Trauma of the Vietnam War, Grief, Rage, and Her Novel ‘O Sinners!’
We ask our past contributors to keep in touch and let us know if they have writing or publishing news after being featured in Write or Die Magazine! We are so honored to have published these writers and their work. Here is a look at what they've been celebrating since their appearance in our mag!
Kayleigh Norgord
Author of “The Bimbo Bandit,” published January 30, 2024
News: My personal essay, “The Dive Reflex,” is featured in the Spring/Summer issue of Post Road Magazine. I also gave a brief interview about inspiration and the intuitive writing process behind it.
If you are a past contributor to our magazine, we want to hear from you! If you have any writing or publishing news, tell us about it via this form, and we will share it in our newsletter!
I need a mentor, and "Tag! You're it!" Don't worry....no hassling. Just wanted to tell you that I'm reading medical mysteries for "comps." Naturally, it takes time, even when reading 1,500 words a minute (I've been clocked). But I need some guidance, and that was a good one. Thanks.