Submission Guidelines: Literary Reflections

Literary Reflections Editors: Deborah Richardson & Blair Lipsitz

Please submit your work using this form. 

Our department celebrates how art and creativity influence and inform your insights on motherhood. Ideally, your piece will use experiences from motherhood that reflect back to literature or other artistic mediums, such as music, art, and film.

What We’re Looking For:

• Pieces that reflect upon motherhood through the lens of a literary work or artistic expression. A creative medium should act as a throughline throughout your essay
• Reflections and meditations on how art (including producing and consuming art) influences motherhood and your own questions and insights about motherhood
• A distinctive personal voice 
• A fresh or startling perspective 
• A well-developed essay—our word count is 2,000-3500. We are looking for an excavation of emotion and insight.

What We Aren’t Looking For:

• Lamentations about how hard it is to write with children underfoot. While we empathize, we’re looking for essays that surprise us and offer alternative takes on motherhood and creativity.
• Motivational, how-to, or self-help-style articles. 
• Pieces that don’t meet our minimum word count. It takes time and space to reflect and dig deep. 
• Self-promotional pieces: please review our profiles and reviews department guidelines if you are looking for potential coverage of your books.

Please review our archives and these tips from our editors on writing a Literary Reflections essay before you submit. 

Recently published essays include:

• Sara Nolan illustrates her fight against the evil stepmother stereotype through the lens of Cinderella in Stepwhat?.
• Alison Colwell’s The Patchwork Quilt weaves an extended metaphor to tell a story of evolving identity.
• In Rage Against the Melancholia, Dave Patterson exposes the parental passage-of-time ache, then reveals how it informs his writing as a father.

Other examples include:

• For the Love of Lemony Snicket
• Why We Still Need Ramona’s Realism
• Raising Readers: A Mother’s Tale from the Trenches
• Bernadette and Me
• Keeping a Writer’s House with The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes
• Dead Scientists Society
• Dear Virginia

Please also review our General Submission Guidelines before sending submissions of 2,000-3,500 words as a .doc attachment. From the form linked at the top of this page,select “Literary Reflections” from the “Department” dropdown menu. We typically respond within four to six weeks. If you don’t hear from us after six weeks, feel free to follow up.

For inquiries, contact us at: lmreflections (at) literarymama (dot) com.