Max Talley
Improving & Submitting Your Writing
Monday-Friday
9:00-11:30 AMTerrace 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 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, essays, or novels, with the goal of ensuring that an editor keeps reading. After getting to know an individual’s style, Max suggests appropriate outlets for their work.
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, poems, 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. This workshop covers basic rules in formatting, grammar, and submission guidelines. We will read the first three pages of writers’ stories or novel looking for ways to strengthen the crucial beginning of the story to compel slushpile readers to continue reading.
Bio
Max Talley has had seventy stories and essays published since 2015. His writing has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Litro, and The Saturday Evening Post. He won the 2021 best fiction contest in Jerry Jazz Musician for "Celestial Vagabonds," later nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Talley has two published novels and two story collections, My Secret Place, and the most recent, When The Night Breathes Electric, which debuted in 2023 from Borda Books.
