Welcome to Judith Magazine

Children of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe of Jewish writers, artists and allies:

Please help me promote your work.

Here's how:

I plan to feature a different writer or Jewish creator in Judith Magazine at least 3 times a week. I may just work on the magazine on the days I'm not writing the Never Alone newsletter, which would be Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

The ideas I have for the magazine may evolve over time, but for right now, here's what I envision for each writer's showcase. Please include all the following elements in your submissions:

1. The most immediate, riveting, tanatalizing excerpt you can find of your work. If you're a poet, send your 3 best poems. If you're a novelist, find a passage that hooks the reader and sings. You get the idea. The excerpt can be up to 1800 words, but doesn't have to come anywhere near that word count.
   

2. Your bio (a paragraph)
   

3. Your favorite photo of yourself
   

4. If appropriate, a few artistic images to accompany your work (with attribution if it's original art). This magazine will be writer-centric but I'd love to promote Jewish artists too in this incidental way if it happens to work. If you don't have images you want or like to accompany your work, I might suggest some. No images will accompany your work without your approval.
   

5. If your work can be bought at this time, please provide relevant links so readers can purchase immediately.
   

6. And finally, there's a tiny interview template I'd love for you to complete. This section focuses on tiny, everyday pleasures, because Judaism is so much about this world, and daily life, and I want to highlight the joyful, beautiful aspects of being in this world and being Jewish. We have so much suffering to endure. So much persecution, discrimination, hatred, darkness, war, grief, heartbreak. So to me it's deeply essential to have the light and the joy alongside it.
   
   Here are the two questions and an idea of how you might approach them:
   
   What are five tiny delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?
   
   1. Drinking coffee on the porch during a hard rain
   
   2. Local squirrels and birds descending on our front yard after I've scattered seeds for them
   
   3. Collecting driftwood and sea glass on the beach
   
   4. The scent of Dragon Pearl Jasmine tea
   
   5. The periwinkle shade of fresh snow at twilight
   
   What are five tiny JEWISH delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?
   
   1. The beauty of the Havdalah ritual: the braided, multi-wicked candle and the spicebox
   
   2. The sight of starlings nesting in the Western Wall
   
   3. The aroma of baking challah
   
   4. Seeing Jewish men wrapped in their blue and white tallit at shul
   
   5. The haunting strains of the Unetaneh Tokef during Kol Nidre

Try to make your tiny delights as immediate and evocative as possible. HaShem is in the details! Draw on as many senses as you can when filling out these forms.

ALL GENRES ARE WELCOME! I will be delighted to include an excerpt from a children's story or YA book from time to time. To this day, I read children's books for pleasure and I consider some of them -- like Charlotte's Web, Frog and Toad, and City Dog, Country Frog -- as profound as any adult book I've ever read.

SUBMISSIONS CAN START IMMEDIATELY and I intend to accept them year-round.

I will keep these in a file and pull from them continually. Whenever publishing your showcase can coincide with your book release, we will strive to time it to your advantage.

TO SUBMIT: put JUDITH MAGAZINE in the subject heading of your email, the name you wish to publish under, and the genre of your submission.

An example of a subject heading: JUDITH MAGAZINE, Elissa Wald, non-fiction.

For now, submissions can be sent to elissa_karen@msn.com.

I can't wait to read, celebrate and promote the hell out of your work.

Am Yisrael Chai!

Much love,

Elissa