Submit Your Ink

GIRL WITH PEN publicly and passionately dispels modern myths concerning gender, encouraging other feminist scholars, writers, and thinkers to do the same. We frequently post Guest Posts (“Your Ink”) and invite submissions that fall under the topics of our various columns in particular.

If you are interested in contributing GIRL WITH PEN, please send a short pitch along with your bio to the editor of the column for which you’d like to write a post.  Contact info for those editors currently accepting submissions appears on their individual bio pages (see “Who We Are“). If accepted, we will request a turnaround time of 1 week for a post of 300-700 words.

Columns are as follows:

The Coach Is In (Deborah Siegel, Editor): building a bridge to a (more) public voice

Nice Work (Virginia Rutter, Editor): social science in the real world

Science Grrl (Veronica Arreola, Editor): the latest research and press on girls and women in science & engineering

Girl Talk (Allison Kimmich, Editor): truths and fictions about girl

Off the Shelf (Elline Lipkin, Editor): book reviews and news

Bedside Manners (Adina Nack, Editor): applying the sociological imagination to medical topics, with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health

Body Language (Alison Piepmeier, Editor): because control of our bodies is central to feminism. (“It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc., if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” –Lucy Stone, 1855)

Women Across Borders (Heather Hewett, Editor): A transnational perspective on women & girls

Second Look (Susan Bailey, Editor): Reflections of Where We’ve Been and Where We Need to Go

Pop Goes Feminism (Natalie Wilson, Editor): All things popular culture from a feminist perspective

Mediating Beauty (Dara Persis Murray, Editor): writing about the intersections of beauty and feminism as they appear in consumer culture and/or digital culture

The Next Generation (Kyla Bender-Baird, Editor): featuring young feminists under the age of 30 who are not yet established in an academic career

Manly Musings (Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe, Editors): Thoughts on Masculinity, Inequality and Everyday Life

GenderLab (Karlyn Crowley, Editor): Director of new kind of Gender Center runs an experiment. How do we talk about gender and identity in ways that have mass appeal especially for college students? Put on your lab coats and find out.

Oh, God! (Kelsy Burke, Editor): On religion and sexuality

RULES ‘N REGS FOR POSTING ON GWP

Some rules and regs, so that we are all on the same page:

SUBSTANCE. Girl with Pen is about bridging feminist research and popular reality. Posts should generally fall under this rubric. Bust myths and give us facts, with some personal edge and attitude thrown in. Our content has been described as “personal experience blended with evidence-based expert critique.”

      -When polled before the group re-launch, GWP readers favored the posts that offered cultural critique, feminist publishing news/reviews, tips on writing for trade, and items on new research (in that order).

-The best posts are those that are timely, unexpected, passionate, provocative, somewhat personal, and, importantly, evidence-based (ie backed up with stats, research).

LENGTH. The strongest blog posts read like mini, hypertexted op-eds. Op-eds are generally 700-1000 words; posts on Girl with Pen (and most blogs) are shorter (500-700 words max) and are very quick to get to the point.

UNEXPECTED. Go for the counterintuitive, that little known reality that is the opposite of what we all think! There are so many myths out there about the lives of women and girls. Set us straight. Clarify reality. Go beyond the obvious. Surprise us.

PASSIONATE. Tell us what you really think. If you care passionately, others will. Take a stand. Be controversial. Go out on a limb.

PERSONAL. Personal stories keep us reading. Include a personal anecdote or, if you aren’t comfortable writing about yourself, include an anecdote about someone else.

LINKS. Posts must include links, preferably to other items currently in the news. When submitting a post, if you’re comfortable using the html code for links, please use it to embed your link in the text. If not, please include the link in brackets following the word(s) that you’d like to see in hypertext. Put the word(s) that you’d like to hypertext in bold.

EXAMPLE

    : Take the sentence “Please visit my website for more.”  If I wanted the words “my website” to take the reader to my website’s homepage, I would write: Please visit my website [http://www.deborahsiegel.net] for more.

FORMAT. The gist of your post should come in the first 300 words (the section before the jump). Content-wise, please consider this template:

    • Place newshook in first few sentences (newshooks can be new book or research, your own, or someone else’s or an interesting news item, an event, a current or upcoming holiday or anniversary, a current happening in pop culture, a popular assumption that’s the subject of current media coverage, or another article that is currently in the news)
    • State argument or opinion before the jump; use personal voice here; be provocative or counterintuitive if you can
    • In body of post, cite some hard evidence (stats, studies, your own or others’) to back yourself up
    • Conclude by opening it up to readers to react to either by a) posing a question or b) stating a strong opinion

If you’d prefer to use the format of a roundup or a series of quick takes or quick hits, please see examples, here:

Sex and Sensibility: Quick Takes
XY Files: Sexist Earners, Boomerang Boys, and Teenage Dads

Some general principles to keep in mind:

1. We prefer proprietary content. However, if you must crosspost, please post on GWP first.

2. Each blogger is responsible for responding to comments on her (or his) own post; one catch-all comment in response to a batch of comments is fine.