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.
Submissions: October 1 to December 31, 2024
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.
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.
Out of Line: Who Defines? Halfs, Steps, In-Laws & Belonging A Wising Up Anthology
Thirty-nine talented writers join us to explore through poetry, fiction, and memoir what it means, in this day and age, to explore the intricacies of the adoptive, half, step and in-law conditions from every position—parents, children, grandchildren, grandparents, uncles, aunts—and what it means for those many of us who oscillate between these conditions, often in more than one family constellation.
WHOLENESS A Wising Up Anthology Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, Editors
Wholeness is an emergent phenomena, real as life, breath, consciousness—and, like them, can't be explained or predicted by its component parts. It's that something more that heals and reveals possibilities we could not see before. In this Wising Up Anthology, forty-eight talented writers of different ages, countries, ethnicities, and religions explore the experience of wholeness and its impact on our lives through poetry, fiction, memoir, non-fiction, and image.
The broad range of characters in William Cass's moving and accessible second short story collection, Uncommon & Other Stories, all share a fascination with right action—how we know it, when we know it, and what that knowledge asks of us—in real time or in retrospect. Cass's stories are deeply rooted in the particularities of daily life and of nature—whether how to run a small inn in Arizona, harvest hay in Montana, mend an old woman's decaying picket fence, feed oneself through a stomach tube . . .
The historical novel Rowing Home explores how a talented, assimilated Jewish family living in Berlin in 1933 during the early rise of Nazism came to the decision to escape. What finally convinced them that it was time to leave? What confluence of events allowed them to do so?
Both intimate and generalizable, the poems in Source Notes: Seventh Decade revolve around two core questions: "If everything we said to define ourselves/ was preceded by Just like everyone or/ Like most of us, what would shift/ in the life-long construction project/ we call our self?" and "Who says age can't be luxurious,/ astonishing, sui generis?" The poems move from public events to personal ones, explore creativity, age, marriage, early trauma, motherhood, family relationships, and travel, teaching us "we are never too old for rebirth, the hold of the miraculous."
SHARING THE BURDEN OF REPAIR: REENTRY AFTER MASS INCARCERATION A Wising Up Listening Project
Heather Tosteson & Charles D. Brockett
This book describes a six-year listening project on reentry that took place at the crest of an unusual wave of bipartisan criminal justice reform in Georgia, one of our most punishing states. Its primary intended audience is common citizens, like us, concerned about the reality of mass incarceration but unsure how to engage. . .
PRESIDENT BIDEN AND PROSPECTS FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM
Charles D. Brockett, PhD
This ebook meant for the common citizen portrays trends in public opinion about immigration in 21 easily read graphs. These trends are also related to their broader context: Will President Biden succeed where his last three predecessors failed? Certainly it will be a big challenge, but it can be done if we let the public show the way.
We decided to create a small press to expand and support our various Universal Table programs - and because we love the written word, especially when it is used passionately and authentically to explore themes of abiding importance to us as individuals and as a society. Many of our publications focus on literature by contemporary writers because of the power of narrative to help us identify safely with others who may at first seem, by appearance or circumstances or culture, very different from us. Stories make the world feel more manageable by increasing our ability to tolerate suffering, to experience empathy, to marry hope and pain in a way that honors the reality in each of them. Stories teach us, in the very listening, in the very act of identifying with the storyteller, or the characters, that the existence of other points of view is a richness not a danger. In our own lives, most of us find it difficult to tell stories that have good roles for all of us, that can see our differences, however profound, as mysterious, unpredictable, but ultimately gracious - an invitation into a blessing story larger than any one of us can write alone. We want our publications to serve as an invitation to stand in that richer relation - empathic, musing, open to new meaning - with ourselves and with our neighbors.
