GWP institute

Are you a scholar (or someone with their fingers on the pulse of current research about women or girls) seeking to enter the blogosphere and give blogging a try? Read on! Hey, if my grandmas (left) can do it, you can too.

Submission Process
Email me a 1-paragraph overview of the post you’d like to propose. When I greenlight it, please send the full post to me at deborahsiege AT gmail DOT com at least one day before you ideally would want me to run the post. Depending on how many submissions come in any a given week, I may not be able to run every post right away. But I will certainly do my best to try. Submissions should be pasted in the body of your email or attached as a MS Word document.

GUIDELINES FOR POSTING ON GIRL WITH PEN

SUBSTANCE. Girl with Pen is about bridging feminist research, popular reality, and the public. Posts should generally fall under this rubric. The best posts are those that are timely, unexpected, passionate, and somewhat personal.

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 (300-700 words max) and are very quick to get to the point.

TIMELY. Posts must have a news hook. A news hook can be new research (your own, or someone else’s), an interesting news item, an event, an upcoming holiday or anniversary, a happening from pop culture, a popular assumption that’s the subject of current media coverage, or another article that is currently in the news. The news hook must come at the beginning of the post, to capture the scanning web reader’s attention.

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 should include links. 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 (w/o hypertext): 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.

PICTURE AND BYLINE. Be sure to send a jpeg or gif (either a photo of you, or another relevant image related to the post) that you’d like to run with the post, along with a byline that includes your affiliation and anything else you’d like readers to know.

Questions? You can always post ’em in the comments section of this post, because chances are, others will be wondering the same thing. I’ll run additional tips and tidbits in response.

In an era of “America’s Next Top Model” and “Age of Love” (more on that soon – I’m fuming), women’s studies scholars have so damn much to contribute to public debate. Yet too often this work fails to reach an audience outside of the academy. Coming off the NWSA conference this weekend, I’m primed and pumped to share more of what I’ve learned in recent years about going, as they say, “pop.”

3 tips from the “Public Voice” workshop I gave at NWSA:

1. Contrary to what we academics (and ex-, post-, and trans-academics) have been told, writing a book for “trade” is not about dumbing it down. It’s about popping it up, with purpose.

2. A dissertation by any other name is NOT a book.

3. Breaking out of academic writing requires an utter willingness to let yourself play.

5 Recommended Resources:

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg

Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato

The Art of the Book Proposal by Eric Maisel

Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents 2008: Who They Are! What They Want! How to Win Them Over!

If you’re reading this and thinking “yes! I’m ready! let’s go!” do sign up for the Girl with Pen e-mail list and I’ll send notification about dates for future workshops and online courses on “Making It Pop: Translating Ideas for Trade.” (And thanks again to the rockin’ 45 of you who signed up for the session at NWSA!)

After a successful pilot with the National Women’s Studies Association, Girl w/Pen is hitting the streets with a new training series: “Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade.”

Here’s the why:

Public debate lacks a sensitive discussion of the complex forces shaping the lives of women and girls. Researchers, nonprofit workers, and savvy writers everywhere have the opportunity to frame public debate about these issues. Too often, however, important work fails to reach an audience outside the academic and advocacy worlds. Writing a trade book is one way to join the debate. To sell a book in today’s competitive publishing climate, one must be able to write engaging, accessible prose that will appeal to a wide audience.

 These skills can be learned.

And the what:

5-WEEK TELESEMINAR
Girl w/Pen offers an interactive tele-seminar series designed to help researchers and others cross this bridge by learning about the key elements involved in writing a book for “trade.”

A “trade book”—one written the intelligent, general-interest reader and carried by bookstores—is different from an academic book sold primarily through university presses. Participants will learn from exchanges with New York City-based agents and editors why it’s essential to think about audience and market in a different way, and why you need a book proposal. We’ll explore the differences between popular and academic writing, why a dissertation or a monograph is not a trade book, and how to write an effective book proposal—meaning one that has the best chance of being sold.

Participants will be expected to read assigned material (including sample book proposals and a book, Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get It Published), engage in an ongoing online exchange, and participate in a weekly session with the full class and instructor at an established time each week.

1/2-DAY, 1-DAY INTENSIVES
A tailored on-site version that condenses material covered in the teleseminar. Additional topics for consideration include writing articles for magazines, blogging, and op-eds.

UPCOMING SESSIONS:

May 5, 2007 – “Taking Research Public,” Council on Contemporary Families Annual Conference, University of Chicago

June 2, 2007 – “Making It Pop: Trade Books, Popular Magazines, Blogs,” National Council for Research on Women Conference, Spelman College

July 1, 2007 – “Publishing in Women’s Studies: Public Voice,” National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, St. Charles, IL

If you are an academic association or department or a nonprofit organization (or a member of said association, department, organization) and would like further information, please contact me directly at deborahsiege@gmail.com.