PFN – Living our Blessings: Aging, Mortality & Gratitude. A Wising Up Anthology Seeking Submissions on Aging, Mortality & Gratitude

LIVING OUR BLESSINGS
Aging, Mortality & Gratitude
A WISING UP ANTHOLOGY

We invite stories, poems, memoir, and non-fiction that explore how, in ways small and large, our awareness of aging and mortality intensify our appreciation of our present (and past) in ways we never anticipated.

Age is a strange place—filled with abundance and scarcity, more fixed and more fluid than we imagined before we arrived there. Our bodies teach us it is now or never. We have passed our apogee and the arc of our life bends relentlessly earthward. But our hearts won’t stop growing, expanding, revising, and revisioning—and we have to acknowledge that as well. Here the surprising questions are often positive. All that angst, was it really necessary? All that will and drive—did it steer us in the right direction or did it narrow our focus unnecessarily? Has the love, the good, both momentous and minute, we have experienced in our lives gone fully recognized, born fruit, multiplied? Savoring can become a call, a necessary rebalancing of the scales.

One of the simplest ways to do so is just to open to the mystery of the mundane and our own participation in it. It is often so simple it shocks us: The way, after twenty-five or fifty years together, we remain such an intriguing surprise to each other we still can’t finish each other’s sentences. The way we can so vividly recall a decisive, perhaps anguished, moment in our childhood or middle age and see it fall into place in an entirely new, more beneficent, story. The way a minute on the porch listening to the cascade of cicadas can feel like a baptism.

livingourblessings@universaltable.org

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

FOR ALL WISING UP ANTHOLOGIES
Print and Web

We make final editorial submissions on all submitted manuscripts only after the submission deadline.
Electronic submissions only, either Word or RTF.
NO A.I. generated text.

Prose ≤ 5,000 words. Poetry ≤ 5 poems.
Payment in copies
Submit manuscripts electronically

We consider dual submissions and previously published work only if informed of this at time of submission.
Previously published work must be accompanied with a list of where and when it has been previously published, including on the internet.
We do not pay reprint fees. It is the author’s responsibility to get needed permissions.

A GENTLE REMINDER FOR WRITERS

We read all submissions with care because we value the time, effort, and aspirations of our writers. We ask that writers who submit show us the same consideration. Before submitting, please read our Calls for Submissions carefully to make sure that the work you are submitting truly fits the theme in content matter and in tone, for we are more than a literary press, we are one with a clear social commitment to finding the We in Them, the Us in You. We want work that has emotional depth and complexity and that invites us, ultimately, into wiser relation with each other.

We suggest you browse through our list of subjects and then our library and read excerpts from some of our other anthologies,  as well as our mission statement  – A Welcoming Philosophy  – on the home page and our reasons for founding the Wising Up Press.  If you are interested in the Writers Collective, we provide extensive information about that as well.