How long does it take to get traditionally published?

My dream, and perhaps yours too, is to get written work out in the world and read by others. Pursuing traditional publishing takes a long time. How long, exactly? In this particular case, two and half years from submission to publication.

Way back in early 2022, Laraine Herring put out a call for speculative nonfiction essays for an anthology. Laraine is, dare I say, a pioneer of speculative nonfiction. I’m a fan of her speculative memoir, A Constellation of Ghosts, for many reasons, not the least of which is that her 30-plus-years dead father returns to her in the form of a raven when she receives a terrifying cancer diagnosis. (I’m also a fan of her helpful writing book, On Being Stuck, her book that helps women heal from adolescent father loss, and her book coaching that helped me find a new relationship with my grief and creativity, but I digress…)

Back to the timeline. In early 2022, Laraine put out a call for essays: 

“We define speculative memoir/creative nonfiction as: an umbrella genre in which the questions of the author’s work are addressed through speculative elements, which may include ghosts, metaphors, what-ifs, imaginative scenarios, and fantasies. It is memoir/creative nonfiction focused more on the possibilities of the internal world than the facts of the external world…”

Oh, how this call spoke to me: I had been writing about my now-30-years-gone father, his cancer, my inherited gene mutation, and a trip I took to Cassadaga, Florida, the “psychic capital of the world,” to learn about mediumship and, well, to see if maybe my father was trying to get in touch with me after all these years.   

My piece in the anthology that releases on October 1, 2024, is called “Messages From the Psychic Capital of the World: A Research Report.” It is written in the style of a research paper, because in order to tell the story of reaching the age at which my father died, I approached it like an anthropologist. That is to say, I used the method of participant observation, or ethnography, to explore questions about proof and certainty over instinct and emotion, and find out whether a father can still be here, twenty-eight years after his death.

If you too believe, as Hamlet does, that “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” I would love for you to check out the Becoming Real anthology and the reality-expanding works therein. 

Learn more about the book and/or preorder here or at your favorite online and retail locations: https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/becoming-real/

The anthology is donating a portion of its proceeds after expenses to Girls Write Now, a New York based nonprofit.