HeyJaredIf You Give a Girl a Book
If You Give a Girl a Book is a sharp, loving field guide for writers, authors, small press people, mothers, misfits, and literary workers trying to build a serious creative life without becoming well-behaved content.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 16, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 21, 2026
Latest issues
Your Publisher Cannot Get You Invited to Every AWP Party (opens the original)
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Every summer, authors start asking about readings for AWP.Are we doing one? Do we know anyone doing one? Can we get them into something? Is there a bookstore event? A launch? A panel? A party? A reading in the back of a bar where everyone is sweating into a plastic cup of warm wine while seventeen poets wait for their six minutes at the microphone?Sometimes, yes. But honestly, as the kind of person I am, I would so much rather set up a late evening shoot the shit event where authors, editors, an
Field Notes from the Small Press Swamp: The Author Who Vanishes (opens the original)
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Every publisher eventually encounters the vanishing author, that pale departmental cryptid who signs the contract with bright plans, speaks tenderly about audience, and swears they are ready to promote until the first marketing questionnaire arrives and they evaporate like a Victorian child in a draft. Emails sink without bubbles. Read more
What Authors Owe, and What They Don’t. (opens the original)
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Publishing has perfected the art of handing authors instructions that gnaw through one another. Be visible, but not eager. Be generous, but never strategic enough to suggest you have a survival instinct. Be confident, but grateful in the hunched devotional posture preferred by industries that pay in prestige, smoke, and refrigerator magnets. Promote the book, naturally, as if readers discover new releases by following woodland omens to a bookstore staffed by clairvoyant mice. The ideal author is
Dear Summer: I Haven’t Written in Months (opens the original)
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Dear Summer,I haven’t written in months.At first, I told myself I was just resting. Then I blamed it on being busy. Both were true, but neither feels like the whole story anymore. Honestly? I think I’m just terrified to go back.I still think about writing constantly. I collect ideas, I read, I jot down notes on my phone. Sometimes I even open the document, but I can’t seem to stay. The longer this stretches on, the more ashamed I feel. I used to see myself as a writer. Now I don’t know what I am
Permission Slip: Your Life Is Not an Interruption (opens the original)
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You are allowed to make dinner before you finish the chapter.You are allowed to take the walk, call your sister, help your child with the impossible school project, spend an hour in the garden, go to bed early, or sit on the floor with the dog without turning any of it into evidence that you aren’t serious about your work.Your life is not what keeps happening while you fail to write.It is the place from which the writing comes.Writers are taught to distrust nearly everything that competes with t
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