Rowan McCandless’s self-taught approach to the craft helped her garner some success, including award wins in prestigious journals. 

“I had some success with pieces that I’d submitted to contests, but I didn’t really know how to develop my network of where I would submit from there,” Rowan says.

Rowan joined Lit Mag Love because she lacked a writing network and connections to editors.

The guest editors who answered her questions in the course helped her do the networking she needed. “Those experiences were so informative,” she says. “They were just like little gifts, little writerly gifts.”

“Rachel created this online community of writers where we can meet and talk about our submissions successes and struggles and questions and comments.”

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Since taking Lit Mag Love, Rowan won the Constance Rooke CNF Prize, published with The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and Prairie Fire. Her first collection of essays, Persephone’s Children will be published by Dundurn Press in October 2021.

Before taking Lit Mag Love, Tamara had just heard back from a big MFA program with a big “NO!” (That’s how she says it felt to her. Written in all caps and with an exclamation mark.) 

This big NO! shook her. She stopped writing for a month, and was “wrapped in a cocoon of self-doubt.” But a little voice inside her still wanted to be a writer. The spark was still alive.Tamara decided to try Lit Mag Love in the hopes of finding her way back to writing.  

Through Lit Mag Love, Tamara learned to focus on her own motivations for sharing and submitting her writing and to build a plan that suits her true goals for her writing career.She worked with a renewed passion through the lessons, polished up her writing, and started sending out her work with a clear strategy tailored to her aspirations. Tamara shared encouragement with her peers in the Lit Mag Love community, and they shared the same with her. 

“I had new energy for pieces that I dreaded revising and I submitted more work in a few months than the year before.” Tamara had come back to writing​. While in the course, Tamara decided to apply for another writing program—this time she got a big “YES!”“I would not have been able to do all this if I hadn’t taken the course which helped me be more intentional with my submissions, deal with rejection (because it’s part of the writer’s deal), make some great new supportive writer friends (who totally get the writing ups and downs).”She says my course helped her focus on what really matters—the writing. (So true.)“I am indebted to Rachel and this wonderful course and recommend any of her courses. Rachel is a writer who gets writing.”

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Since taking Lit Mag Love, Tamara has published her writing in the anthology Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers, Room, and Carte Blanche.

“I had a weird thing happen,” Anne’s message opened.

It turns out, Anne had submitted a piece to ten lit mags and a lower-tier place accepted her work right away. The “weird” thing was when she withdrew from the higher-tier places, two got back to her telling her they were moved by her work and one said they would have published her piece had she not withdrawn it.Getting such positive response all at once from lit mags was not how things were for Anne before she joined Lit Mag Love.

Anne enrolled in Lit Mag Love because she was frustrated with the submission process. Up to that point, most of her work was getting rejected and she wouldn’t hear back from most literary magazines for many months.

“Getting published seemed nearly impossible,” Anne said.

Anne had gone from months and months of waiting—with many rejections—to having journals fighting to publish her work!Lit Mag Love showed her how she had been going at submitting “all wrong.”

“As soon as I took Rachel’s advice, I started to get acceptance letters in my email. (I just wish I had listened to her about submitting to my tier-one magazines first!)”

“I highly recommend Rachel’s lit mag publishing course. It really fuels you to get published and makes the process easy. The best thing is you will see results!”