Inaugural Call for Submissions
WAYS: methods | styles | manners | states | roads | tracks | paths | streets | directions | facets | routes
About Ways —>
Each issue of Ways will feature two poems by a self-identified “experienced” poet:
one of their very first serious poetic efforts,
and a very recent poem.
Then they’ll discuss what happened between the two poems.
How did the poet develop their aesthetics, voice, themes? Who and what in their life helped them to hone their craft?
Goals
To honour (rather than deride) the creative impulse and innate & autodidactic-derived forms of knowledge, voices, and styles
To examine how mentors, life experiences, hardship, other art forms, work, relationships, identities, and education help to grow a poet’s craft; especially showcasing the ways poets learn and/or further their craft outside of academia
To encourage those who are learning to write or who would like to start writing
Access
100% free to all.
Call for Submissions
If you are willing to share your earliest and most recent work, and describe what happened in between, I want to hear from you. Here’s what you need ready to submit:
An early poetic effort. You need to have access to your early work—I would love to share a picture or at least a text with readers.
A recent, unpublished poem. Choose a poem that you feel showcases your strengths and maturity as a writer.
A short bio, or a link to a bio.
Written answers to a few probing, open-ended questions about these poems and especially about your growth as an artist.
What I’m looking for especially:
WHO: By self-identified “experienced” poets, I mean to include a broad swathe: You may have been writing for a long time but were never published, or you may have been published a great deal, or something in between. Either way, I’m seeking submissions from poets who have written enough poetry that they can look back on a mappable arc of growth.
WHAT: My aim is for this journal to be rich in stories, humility, variety, hope, reality, surprise, humour, tragedy. I want to showcase the process of becoming; to highlight how poetry is a craft that can legitimately be learned via all kinds of paths.
Full disclosure: I respect the MFA model, but I believe higher education is only one of many ways one might cultivate a mature poetic voice.
For this journal, I’m keenly interested in assembling an expansive, inclusive set of maps and routes for growth—ways to learn the poetic craft outside of higher education.
So, while I’m grateful to receive submissions from anyone, if you do have an MFA I’d love for you to include at least one key source of learning and growth you experienced outside of that system.
What to expect:
I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, depending on the volume of submissions and the volume of life.
I’m aiming to showcase 3–6 poets per year, or more if I have the time and resources to do so.
About the Editor
Elisabeth Blair is a poet, editor, and educator with an extensive background in music and the visual arts. Her publications include full-length collection because God loves the wasp (Unsolicited Press 2022), two chapbooks—We He She/It (Dancing Girl Press 2016) and without saying (Ethel Press 2020)—and poems in a variety of journals, including Harpur Palate, Feminist Studies, cream city review, and Juked. Her monthly newsletter, lullabies & alarms, explores the craft of poetry. She has been artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Wildacres, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and ACRE. In 2022 she received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to complete her second book, a poetry novel.
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