WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOST A WISING UP HOUSE READING or START A READING FOR RELATION GROUP?
We see our books, especially our
Wising Up Anthologies, as catalysts for community, a way of deepening the
conversations that develop through the shared experience of reading, especially
around areas of sticky, or strident, social concern . . . Read More
Reading organizers Patricia Barone (left) and Mary Kay Rummel (right) with poet Norita Dittberner-Jax.
Wising Up Reading: Benjamin Doty
WISING UP PRESS WRITERS COLLECTIVE
We publish single author books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and creative non-fiction on themes of interest to Universal Table through the Wising Up Press Writers Collective. To learn more about it and see if it feels right for you, please read more.
We read all submissions with
care because we value the time, effort, and aspirations of our writers. We ask
that writers who submit to us show the same consideration. Before submitting,
please read the Call for Submissions carefully to make sure that the work you are submitting
truly fits the theme in content matter and in tone. 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 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 press, which are found at the bottom of this page.
If you don't have the time to do this, perhaps this isn't the place for you to
submit 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.
ABOUT WISING UP PRESS
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.
