Category: Literary Magazine

Get Published: Submit to Instant Noodles Literary Magazine 2026

Published on by Nadja MarilLeave a comment


by Nadja Maril, a founding member of Old Scratch Press Collective

Happy New Year to readers and writers around the world. May your New Year 2026 be happy, safe, and productive. If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is “get more writing done” you’ve come to the right place. In our Old Scratch Press blog we will continue to discuss different kinds of short form writing, provide instruction and prompts, and share publishing opportunities.

First up is to tell you about our own publication Instant Noodles Literary Magazine. A member of CLMP (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses), we nominate for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Planes, Boats, Cars, Trains is our theme for the Spring Issue 2026 of Instant Noodles Literary Magazine.  

Maybe you love to travel or maybe you like to stay at home, but when you venture out— what kind of transportation takes you on your journey? Are you invigorated by the open water, frantic following road signs, anonymous on a plane, or comforted by the train station whistle?  In the process of getting to your destination, how did the vehicle you’re traveling in affect the outcome?

We’re looking for flash prose (up to 500 words) fiction and nonfiction, as well as poetry, drama, visual art, and multi-media submissions. Deadline: March 15th.

When you send in your submission, as you should with any submission, the piece should be polished and complete with no grammar mistakes and no misspellings.

Also included should be a brief cover letter. The remainder of this blog I’m going to talk about what I think is the appropriate cover letter for a Literary Magazine. (Each magazine is slightly different so always read their guidelines).

Photo by Oscar Ruiz on Pexels.com

Editors at Literary Magazines generally use the cover letter that contains a very brief biography ( 50 to 75 words) as the same biography they use in the publication, if you are lucky enough to have your story or poem accepted. Thus, even if writing is a new found love or second career, you want to keep it “professional.” 

Rather than listing everywhere you’ve been published, pick no more than three places. (ex. They’ve been published in Dawn Magazine, Sunshine Press, Dark Days and many other publications.) If you have never been published, that’s okay. Magazines are always looking for NEW TALENT.

In your cover letter, DO NOT SUMMARIZE the work you are submitting. Editors want to read it without preconceived notions. If it needs to be “explained” this is a red flag. DO NOT excessively brag about what a wonderful writer you are or exaggerate your accomplishments.

IF you have one interesting personal fact ( ex. They’re a champion parachutist.) you’d like to include, it can enhance a cover letter, but to tell the story of your life is not recommended. Too long a cover letter can be a turn off.

Links to a book you’ve published and/or your website or blog is always a good idea. If a reader wants to read more of your work it is helpful.

Always be polite and kind in your dealings with other writers and editors. Everyone is working hard and many are volunteering their time because they love the art of writing.

Never give up, if you think you’ve written something good. Often pieces, particularly in a theme call, are rejected because they are not a good fit for a particular issue. Always work to improve unpublished work by revisiting it and revising it, when appropriate. Read and submit to multiple magazines.

HAVE A GREAT WRITING YEAR and keep perfecting your craft. LEARNING is part of the journey.

Thank you for reading. Please sign up to follow Old Scratch Press here on WordPress and on Facebook.

Nadja Maril is an award winning writer and poet who has been published in dozens of online and print literary journals and anthologies including: Lunch Ticket, Invisible City Literary Review, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is the author of Recipes From My Garden, published by Old Scratch Press (September 2024), a Midwest Review California Book Watch Reviewer's Choice. An Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at USM. 
Check out Nadja's chapbook of flash memoir and poetry below.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/recipes-from-my-garden-nadja-maril/1145598579

Writing About Food and Announcing the Latest Issue of Instant Noodles Literary Magazine!

Published on by Nadja Maril1 Comment

by Nadja Maril,a founding member of Old Scratch Press Collective

Food. We spend a substantial part each day preparing, serving, and eating. The tastes, aromas and textures bring back memories. And over the winter holidays, the sensations become magnified as we taste the turkey roasting in the oven, the creamy mashed potatoes, the fragrant puddings, the sweet and savory carrots, onion topped green beans, latkes and apple sauce, cheese blintzes, and buttery chocolate chip cookies.

This is why I enjoy writing about food. It’s easy. All I have to do is close my eyes, remember and think of words to describe memorable dishes, new tastes I discovered, and meals I’ve shared. Try it. Think of a favorite meal, why it stands out in your mind and the emotions you associate with that time. Write down you uncensored thoughts. Read over what you’ve written. Maybe cross out a few sentences and rewrite others. You’ve begun to write memoir, the start of what is called Creative Nonfiction and it wasn’t hard at all.

You can take those food thoughts and memories and turn them into fiction as well. There’s no shortage of food in fairy tales: the witch in Hansel and Gretal with the house made of gingerbread and candy, the red apple in Snow White, the porridge eaten by Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Wonderful poems have been written about food ingredients. One of the most important items I use in savory dishes is onion. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) wrote a wonderful poem about the onion I’d like to share.

ODE TO THE ONION
by Pablo Neruda

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

If you need more inspiration, start reading the latest issue of Instant Noodles Literary Magazine .All the stories and poems are inspired by GRAVY.

One of my favorites in this issue is “Thanksgiving Leftovers” by Arielle Arbushites which begins “Gravy gravy everywhere/and not a drop to drink” Hear her read the poem by clicking this link.

Forty-two creative expressions inspired by GRAVY! Who would have thought we’d get so many fine submissions on this topic. Read them and enjoy the writer’s different takes on the subject. Maybe it is a holiday dinner that goes wrong or a humble food offering that needs a splash of pzazz but all the stories have something to do with gravy.

My creative nonfiction includes a nod to my great-grandmother’s Limoges covered gravy dish and a recipe. You can access it here or if you don’t want to read, you can listen here

Writers and Readers, don’t forget to forget to follow us on Facebook to get the latest news and learn about submission opportunities.

Nadja Maril is an award winning writer and poet who has been published in dozens of online and print literary journals and anthologies including: Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, Invisible City Literary Review, Instant Noodles and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is the author of Recipes From My Garden, published by Old Scratch Press (September 2024), a Midwest Review California Book Watch Reviewer’s Choice. An Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at USM.

Check out Nadja’s chapbook below and here.

Words with Dual Meanings: A Writer’s Playground

Published on by Nadja MarilLeave a comment

by Nadja Maril

Words. They fascinate me, the way some words like dust can have two very different meanings. You dust the house, removing small particles of dirt and cobwebs. You dust the cake with confectioner’s sugar making it sweet.

The word weather has two opposite meanings as a verb. The new wood shingles on the house will look better when they weather and turn a soft natural gray. Or used differently you could write, When the next hurricane arrives, I’m not sure if we can weather the storm. As a noun, the meaning of weather is constant. The noun describes meteorological conditions.  Nice fall weather we’re having.

Applying Word Meanings to Getting Published

Every Monday when I read the updated lists of publishing opportunities in literary magazines, I read theme call-outs that generally consist of one word. Write to the theme, they ask, but sometimes that word can be open to wide interpretation.  However, that’s the job of a creative writer; to put our own perspective into our poems and stories.

Photo by Gaurav Ranjitkar on Pexels.com

I read the word dirt and I might picture a pile of soil or imagine filth within a house or think instead of scandalous information about a crooked politician. Playing in the dirt making mudpies can be a joyful experience for a child whereas cleaning away mounds of accumulated filth a tedious chore. The diverse interpretations of how we interpret words can be what makes a collection of writing interesting.

The diverse interpretations of how we interpret words can be what makes a collection of writing interesting.

So, I was surprised when a friend told me their spouse had purchased my new book (Recipes From My Garden; herb and memoir short prose and poetry) and with the cold weather coming, they were planning on trying out some of my recipes.

i’d written a book of prose poems and memoir and my friend thought I’d just published a cookbook!

How Word Choice for Your Title Affects Marketing

Recipes. Yes, the word can mean instructions on food preparation, ie try my recipe for chicken soup, but it can also mean a way or approach to doing things. You might say I’ve got the recipe for a successful children’s birthday party, one adult for every child. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, you might hear about a class trip to the amusement park with no parent chaperones and say, That’s a recipe for disaster.

I thought I was being clever when I chose the title to my little chapbook. I imagined that readers seeing the words memoir, prose, and poetry would understand the book’s double meaning. It does contain a few actual recipes and many references to food and kitchen gardens, but primarily I was thinking of the word recipe as a way or approach of doing things. As memoir, the usage becomes personal. As a poet, I’m sharing how I see the world, starting specifically with what is accessible to me: the sunflowers, tomatoes, a walk on the beach.

The good news for me is  if there is any doubt, the silver lining is people do talk about what they read and like. But if you are new to thie site and you are just reading about my chapbook for the very first time, I also have a book trailer. My talented publishers were able to use some of the video my husband took of our giant sunflowers along with old family photographs and more recent ones to create a wonderful book trailer. You can watch by clicking on the link: https://youtu.be/HxmwOx3-_QY

And going with the theme of the multiple meanings of words, here is a word WRITING PROMPT

To get you started I have chosen a few ambiguous words: long, cleave, bar, and duck. Select a word, choose a meaning, and start writing a scene. Take the word and use it with an alternate meaning. How many different ways can you use the same word and shade the meaning in different ways? Try using the word in a poem and play with the multiple meanings.  Have fun.

Thank You for reading! To read more of my work sign up for FREE to follow me on WordPress, Substack or Medium and visit my website at www.Nadjamaril.com.

Don’r forget to follow Old Scratch Press on Facebook and on WordPress.

Published by Nadja Maril

Nadja Maril’s prose and poetry has been published in literary magazines that include Change Seven, Lunch Ticket, Thin Air, and The Compressed Journal of Creative Arts. She is the author of Recipes From My Garden, a chapbook published by Old Scratch Press that includes both poetry and creative nonfiction prose. Author of two children’s books illustrated with paintings by her father Herman Maril, as well as Who IS Santa? for which she did her own illustrations, Nadja is also the author of two reference books on antique American Lighting, published by Schiffer. A former journalist and magazine editor, Nadja has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. To read more of her work and follow her weekly blog posts, visit Nadjamaril.com https://nadjamaril.com/ View more posts

LAST CHANCE!

Published on by dianneP1 Comment

Last Chance to get published this year!
SUBMISSIONS FOR 2025 ARE OPEN THROUGH 11.02.25.

The Old Scratch Press team asks that all fiction/non-fiction pieces adhere to a word count of 500 words or less.

Topics/themes for 2025

GRAVY is our 2025 winter holiday theme. Give us your best holiday gravy fails, mishaps, ridiculous gravy encounters (any December holiday, from Hanukkah, to Solstice, to NYE, etc.) or your best funny work about gravy, in general. The point of the end-of-year issue is to be light-hearted to downright silly.

Submissions close NOVEMBER 2, 2025; the issue will publish DECEMBER 1, 2025.

SUBMIT!

You know you want to!

Steps Toward Your First Acceptance in a Literary Journal

Published on by virginiawatts2 Comments

Steps Toward Your First Acceptance in a Literary Journal

To my fellow writers out there, I began submitting prose and eventually poetry to literary magazines in 2014. Since that time, I have been published over a hundred times. How did I do it? I learned the ropes and never gave up. More importantly, I never wrote for the purpose of being published. It’s an honor, a wonderful feeling, to have a piece accepted, but in the end of the day, the real joy for me as it is for most writers, is the creative process. Publishing is a very small piece of this magical puzzle. Even so, as writers, most of us would like our work to be read so here are some tips I learned along the way.

  1. Present your best work always. If you have written something, set it aside for some time and return to it later for perspective. ALWAYS have feedback through a professional writing group. One or two friends reading your work will not do. You need professional critique and then you must listen and learn to edit accordingly. None of us can judge our own writing. We simply cannot. Don’t let your ego get in the way of your success.
  2. Prepare a third-person biography. Include information like your location, your publications if you have some, your social media handles and website. If you have not been published, simply say nothing about that or mention that this would be a debut publication. Don’t try to be funny or clever. Be professional.
  3. Prepare a cover letter and keep it simple and professional as well. Address the editor by name if you can. Start with something like: I appreciate the opportunity to submit my fiction story titled “Wind Warp” of 4900 words. Follow with your biography. End by thanking the editor for considering your work. That’s it.
  4. Make a list of journals where your work appears to be a fit as you prepare to submit your work. This will mean reading some of the work the journals have accepted in the past. Lucky for us, many journals are online now or have some excerpts online. Consult resources by Erika Krouse or Clifford Garstang for a ranking of literary journals. 
  5. At first, I tried to select mostly smaller, well-respected journals for the bulk of my submissions. Once I got some traction, I aimed higher. If you can find a local journal that limits submissions to local writers, even better.  One example of this is Philadelphia Stories, a journal that only publishes writers who are living in or originally from Pennsylvania, Delaware or New Jersey. A smaller pool helps your odds. There is nothing wrong with submitting to a new journal either. In fact, I recommend it. New journals need our support.
  6. I would send a piece to at least twenty journals to start with and see how it goes. 
  7. Use standard manuscript format 12-point font Times New Roman. Double Space prose. Single Space poetry. And don’t forget page numbers. 
  8. Be encouraged if editors write you a personal note about enjoying your work even though it was not accepted or asking you to submit more work in the future or telling you that you made it to the final cut. All of these are a very big deal so be happy!
  9. You will receive a lot of rejections. I submitted for about a year and a half before I received my first acceptance. Since then, I have had times where I have been “hot” and times of drought. Don’t give up and don’t get discouraged. There are many reasons a piece is not chosen that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. You get used to the rejections. Promise me. The way I look at it is this writing that I am submitting is what I have to offer. I’ve got nothing else! This is me. I write what comes to me and what I want to write about. Above all, I just hope to tell a good story. I give every poem or story my all. There have been stories that I never placed, and I am okay with that. Some of these did get out in the world in later collections of mine alongside published stories. Be true to yourself and what your heart wants to write about and you will be fine.
  10. Do not follow up with inquiries about your work after it is submitted. If you don’t hear anything for a year, consider the piece unaccepted and move on.
  11. Make sure you keep a list of all the places you submit a piece so when you do have an acceptance, you can quickly withdraw it from other journals considering your piece.  
  12. Remember too that when submitting to always follow the guidelines such as whether the journal wants to read blind or not. 
  13. Set up a Submittable account because most journals use that now for submissions although some still have their own Submission System or they accept submissions via email only.
  14. Another good idea is to go out for dinner and some glasses of wine with fellow writers submitting their work to share your experiences. Laughter is the best medicine, and you can learn from each other. 
  15. I wish all of you the very best in your writing journey!

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was short listed for 2024 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her.

Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:

Her prior poetry chapbooks Shot Full of Holes and The Werewolves of Elk Creek 

 are available from Moonstone Press. And her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House is not to be missed!

In October OSP will present a live reading with Virginia, Anthony Doyle, and Alan Bern. Find more information here.

And it’s not too late to get into the last Instant Noodles issue for 2025!

It’s Not Too Late for Gravy

Published on by diannePLeave a comment

The holiday/end of year issue of INSTANT NOODLES, the issue where we always ask people to try for humor. Do you have what it takes to make us smile?

Submissions for 2025 are open through November 2, 2025.

The Old Scratch Press team asks that all fiction/non-fiction pieces adhere to a word count of 1,000 words or less. 

2025 Themes and Topics

GRAVY is our 2025 winter holiday theme. Give us your best holiday gravy fails, mishaps, ridiculous gravy encounters (any December holiday, from Hannukah, to Solstice, to NYE, etc.) or your best wry work about gravy, in general. The point of the end-of-year issue is always to be light-hearted to downright silly. Submissions for GRAVY are open through NOVEMBER 2, 2025; the issue will publish on DECEMBER 1, 2025. Please CLICK HERE to submit. We’re looking for short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, art, and multi-media.

INSTANT NOODLES is always free to submit to, and free to read. We’re about to announce the pieces that were published that we’re submitting to BEST OF THE NET and PUSHCART, so stay tuned to this station!

Thanks for being an INSTANT NOODLES participant and/or fan! We appreciate you giving indie authors a place to get read!

Look Over Here!

Published on by virginiawattsLeave a comment

Sitting on a bench sharing a coffee with old friends in a little northern Pennsylvania village, I saw it for myself. How much poetry in public places matters, even there, in remote mountains, where only about a hundred people reside year-round. Dangling from the willing arms of trees, laminated cards with phrases from poems or short poems that captivated both young and old. Children read them to each other aloud. Adults stopped on their morning walk to pause, read, reflect, nod, sigh or smile. Even some hard to please teenagers stopped their bike tires to read. What I didn’t expect to feel is how much it meant to them and to me. Poetry matters, folks. It matters big time. All writing matters. The Arts make all the difference in the world. 

            This little town is reflecting other larger movements to display poetry in outdoor places from around the world. Many people have heard of the Poetry in Motion initiative launched 1992 by the NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Poetry Society of America to bring poetry to millions of harried and stressed commuters. Poetry was displayed is subway cars and digital screens in stations. Each poem was accompanied by artwork. By 2002, 150 poems had been shared from all over the world, spanning the centuries. The poems reached out and met people in their own busy lives and enriched them. Readers reported looking forward to a new poem. They would snap pictures and send them to their friends. The world was different, changed and better.

            The Poetry in Motion Initiative was relaunched in 2012 under MTA Arts and Design. You can visit their website to read poems and learn of upcoming programs. Over 30 other US cities launched similar initiatives in the wake of Poetry in Motion including Philadelphia, LA, Nashville, San Francisco and Providence. Public poetry has popped up in many other places such as cafes, libraries, playgrounds and picnic tables in seven national parks thanks to Ada Limon our 24th Poet Laureate who championed the idea of transforming picnic tables into public art by including a historic poem with some connection to the park. 

            There is also a Facebook page “The Poetry in Public Places Project” that encourages everyone, you and me, to display poetry outdoors. You can visit this page to enjoy creative and inspiring ideas. For example, from Hoboken, NJ, a photo of a box of poetry where people are invited to TAKE ONE, yard signs from the Mercer County Library System, a poem painted on a breakwater in Milwaukee. 

             I wondered what poems went first in the NYC Poetry in Motion. There were four of them. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman, “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats, “Let There Be New Flowering” by Lucille Clinton and one of my favorites. Enjoy this poem and cheers to more poetry in the open air and hope!

—Ginny

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

                                                                Emily Dickinson

If the New York Subway System asked you for a poem, what would you write?

Virginia Watts has been fortunate to have published nearly 100 pieces in literary magazines including CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost Magazine, Broadkill Review, Two Thirds North, Hawaii Pacific Review, Sky Island Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, Evening Star Review and Streetlight Magazine. Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net, in 2019, Watts won The Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction.

Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:

Her prior poetry chapbooks Shot Full of Holes and The Werewolves of Elk Creek 

 are available from Moonstone Press. And her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House is not to be missed!

Seeking Sanctuary in what you Read

Published on by gilliampoetLeave a comment

For many of us, reading is a means of escaping the clamor of the real world for a brief time. The theme of the current issue of Instant Noodles is “Sanctuary.” If you’re seeking to give your brain a respite from the news feed, head on over to read the latest issue, curated by the members of Old Scratch Press!

Instant Noodles is open for submissions for our Winter issue! If you have a piece that fits our “Gravy” theme and is on the light-hearted side, please check out the submission guidelines here! We try to fill our Winter issue with fun and mayhem, so please remember that HUMOR, not melancholy is our ask for this issue!

Old Scratch Press is also seeking new members to join our collective! If you write short form pieces (like flash fiction, poetry, or flash memoir), and you’re interested in working with our collective to publish your collection of work, check out our submission guidelines at Duotrope to see if we might be a good fit! The submission window closes on August 31!

Creative Writing Prompt Inspired by Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake

Published on by Nadja MarilLeave a comment

By Nadja Maril, a founding member of the Old Scratch Short Form and Poetry Collective.

Summer and reading go hand in hand. You go on vacation and take along a stack of all those books you’ve been meaning to read.

Sometimes, for me I have to confess I’m actually listening instead of turning pages.( Did you know that most of the books published by Old Scratch Press are available as audio books as well as ebooks?) Half of the books I enjoy these days are recorded books because I can listen and do various chores at the same time.

I can also eat lunch and be entertained by a book without smearing avocado or salad dressing on its pages.

And then if I really love the book, or just want to see it laid out on the page, I get a physical copy from the library and enjoy it again.

I try really hard not to read books by the same authors, so I can introduce myself to new voices. However, I couldn’t resist downloading Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake, because I was curious about what it had to do with cherry orchards. The audio version is narrated by Meryl Streep. What a treat.

I’m a Meryl Streep fan and the narrator and protagonist of Tom Lake, the novel is a former actress. True, she is a different kind of actress, “a natural”, as she reveals in her story telling, unlike Streep who has portrayed a wide range of characters, but the protagonist has performed on stage and screen nevertheless. Streep does an impeccable job

What I truly want to recommend about the novel is its construction. So, writers, and aspiring writers pay attention. Not only does Patchett incorporate unpredictable twists and turns into the storyline, but she skillfully interweaves past and present.

The present setting is a farm near Traverse City Michigan during the Covid Pandemic. The past setting, that jumps back and forth into the storyline, is a summer stock theater also in Northern Michigan called Tom Lake. Part of the fun of this story is the gradual reveal of how present and past fit together.

I highly dislike predictable plotlines. Thus, I shout the praises for a novel that continued to surprise me to the very last page.

If you are a writer, continuing. on the journey of further refining your craft, you may be interested in the upcoming opportunity to join the Old Scratch Press Writing Collective or the opportunity to become published in Instant Noodles Literary Review. The Collective applications are available here and the deadline is closing soon.

The next theme subject for the Holiday/Winter Issue of Instant Noodles is Gravy. Write a true story, a poem or a piece of fiction related to Gravy. Keep it short. We prefer prose that is less than 500 words in length.

Back to my thoughts on the novel Tom Lake and not wanting to give any spoilers, I’m going to provide a WRITING PROMPT instead:

Photo by Sarah Chai on Pexels.com

IMAGINE your very first boyfriend or girlfriend, remember what they were like to be with and then write about what attracted you to them, what you admired. Now, write about their flaws.

Take a break. Maybe wait an hour or a day. Then imagine yourself with that person and what your life would be like. The third part to this writing assignment is to first think about what you would tell that person, if you had the opportunity, write them something—a letter, an essay, a poem—whatever genre form you choose. Do you have things you’d like to apologize about, or explain, or share?

Maybe this exercise will give you an idea for a story. Maybe not, but I guarantee you’ll learn something about yourself.

THANK YOU for reading. If you haven’t already signed up (it’s free!), please follow me on WordPress. Medium or Substack and visit my website Nadjamaril.com to read more of my work.

Nadja Maril is an award winning writer and poet who has been published in dozens of online and print literary journals and anthologies including: Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, Invisible City Literary Review, Instant Noodles and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is the author of Recipes From My Garden, published by Old Scratch Press (September 2024), a Midwest Review California Book Watch Reviewer’s Choice. An Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at USM. 

Join Us! You Know You Want To!

Published on by diannePLeave a comment