Lit Mag Love
A Six-Week Course to Help You Publish and Shine
Next Session Starts May 13
Join the Waiting List
Publish and Shine with lots of support!
Ready for a big “YES” for your writing from lit mags you love?
Learn to submit the right way—for you! Join us in this six-week live course session to get results from your submissions. Prepare to publish in journals that align with your writing and give your writing career a powerful boost.
The next session runs May 13–June 24, 2025.
Join the waiting list
And get a discount!
Not having much luck publishing in lit mags?
Is this you?
- You feel overwhelmed about sending your writing to journals. (Some of it has been languishing in drawers for years!)
- You submit to lit mags, but get frustrated with the long waits, followed by the sting of rejection.
- You wish you knew what editors want in submissions.
- You crave a community of writers to support you and your publishing dreams.
Publish & Shine!
after Lit Mag Love...
- Know the steps you must take to publish your work and take those steps with lots of support!
- Get a big “YES” for your writing from a dream journal—and then another, and another.
- Have a warm community of writers at your fingertips, with helpful advice and support when you need it.
If you are ready to set some big goals for your writing this year, I’m here to help you reach them.
Hi, I'm rachel Thompson
I am a literary magazine editor (with Room), a published author, and the host of the Write, Publish, and Shine Podcast.
I am here to help you publish your most luminous work.
Join the waiting list
And get a discount!
The Course Alumni Have Published in Over 200 Journals and Anthologies!
200 (Plus!) Lit Mags Published
Click for a list of just SOME of the journals that published writers after they completed the Lit Mag Love course...
50 Word Stories
Angry Old Man Magazine
Anti-Heroin Chic
Apparition Literary Magazine
Askance Journal
Atlas and Alice
Atticus Review
Augur Magazine
Automata Review
Baltimore Review
Barren Magazine
Belletrist Magazine
Better Than Starbucks
Black Dandy
Blank Spaces Magazine
Broken Pencil
Bywords
Canthius
carte blanche
Carve Literary Magazine
Catapult
CBC
Chaudiere Books
Cleaver Magazine
CNFC
Cold Creek Review
Contemporary Verse 2
Contrary Magazine
County Lines: A Literary Journal
Crab Fat Magazine
Crack The Spine
CutBank
Cypress: A Poetry Journal
Dappled Things
The Deadlands
Door is a Jar Magazine
Dreamers Creative Writing
Drunk Monkeys
Empty House Press
Entropy
Escape Pod’s Artemis Rising 4
Ethel
EVENT Magazine
Existere
Filling Station
Five on the Fifth
Five Minute Lit
Flash Fiction Magazine
flo.
Forge Magazine
Freeze Frame Fiction
Fustion Fragment
Geez Magazine
Geist
Glint Literary Journal
Gone Lawn
Grain Magazine
Haiku Seed
Hamilton Arts & Letters
Hart House Review
Held Magazine
Hippocampus Magazine
Hobart
Humber Lit Review
Imprint Anthology
In/Words Magazine
Invisiblog
JMWW
Journal of Compressed Arts
Joyland Magazine
Juncture Workshops
Kissing Dynamite Poetry
Light and Dark Magazine
Literary Mama
Little Fiction Big Truths
long con magazine
LooseLeaf Magazine
Madcap Review
Maisonneuve
Marías at Sampaguitas
Memoir Magazine
Minola Review
Mom Egg Review
Nailed Magazine
Neworld Review
OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters
Oyster River Pages
Panorama Journal
Parentheses Journal
Plenitude Magazine
Porcupine Literary
Prairie Fire
PRISM international
Proximity
PseudoPod
Pulp Literature
QWF Writes
Red Alder Review
Red Eft Review
revue
PØST poésie contemporaine
Reckon Review
Ricepaper
Riddled With Arrows
Riddle Fence
River Teeth
Room
Rust + Moth
Sabr Literary Magazine
Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly
SAVVYMOM
She Writes Press
Silver Birch Press
Six Hens
Sky Island Journal
Small Beer Press
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
SubTerrain Magazine
Synth
Tales To Terrify
The /tƐmz/ Review
The Antigonish Review
The Arcanist
The Brevity Blog
The Cabinet of Heed
The Common
The Dalhousie Review
The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review
The Ekphrastic Review
The Feathertale Review
The Fiddlehead
The Foundationalist Journal
The Globe and Mail
The Gravity of the Thing
The Loyalhanna Review
The Lyre
The Malahat Review
The Masters Review
The Maynard
The Nasiona
The New Quarterly
North Dakota Quarterly
The Puritan
The Rumpus
Sleet Magazine
The Sun
The Walrus
The Wicked Library
The Writer Magazine
The Writing Disorder
This Magazine
Thread
Three Drops from a Cauldron
Tiny Essays
Train Journal
Understory Magazine
Unlost Journal
Vallum Magazine
Vastarien: A Literary Journal
Watch Your Head
Wild Musette Journal
WordWorks
X-R-A-Y
Lit Mag Love taught me to be more professional in terms of the writing practice. Getting published isn’t just throwing your work into the dark. You have to be strategic about it. I really liked that Lit Mag Love broke it down into specific goals.
Lit Mag Love was the impetus I needed to get serious and motivated about my submissions.
Rachel was a luminous guide offering equal parts gentle prompts and discerning truths.
My writing life has exploded since taking the Lit Mag Love course! I’ve had five short stories accepted in the space of a few months (along with some inevitable rejections) and I feel I’m really on the right track.
Being part of Lit Mag Love and working with Rachel Thompson transformed my writing by opening avenues to publications, developing community, and furthering my commitment to craft.
Rachel is a fantastic mentor and I highly recommend this course.
I think Lit Mag Love is a winner because it gives practical help for those writers who are ready to leap and just don’t know how. Doing this with a group made it “fun” in a way and it didn’t feel as if I were drudging along in my “room of one’s own.”
Lit Mag Love Student Stories
How Rowan built her writing network with no “writing establishment” connections.
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.”
===
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 was published by Dundurn Press and a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
How Tamara went from the heartbreak of rejection to saying “yes” to her writing.
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.”
===
Since taking Lit Mag Love, Tamara has published her writing in the anthology Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers, Room, and Carte Blanche. Her forthcoming memoir will be published by Book*Hug.
“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!”
Join the waiting list
And get a discount!
Need More Info?
Here is and Outline of the Course Curriculum…
MODULE 1: TAILOR a LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
- Get Clear About Why You Want to Publish in Journals
- Explore the Lit Mag Landscape
- Pairing Journals to Fit Your Writing Goals
MODULE 2: PREPARE YOUR SUBMISSION
- What Do Editors Want?
- Ready Your Writing
- Preparing Your Submission
MODULE 3: BUILD YOUR SUBMISSIONS SYSTEM
- Goals & Systems
- Fine-Tune Your Lit Mag List
- The Cover Letter
MODULE 4: PREPARE FOR FEEDBACK
- Rejection and Hyper-Critical Feedback
- Types of Rejection
- The Art of Acceptance
Here are Some Frequently Asked Questions About the Course…
Umm...What exactly are lit mags?
Good question! Lit mags is short for literary magazines, and are also known as literary journals. They typically publish at least one genre of creative writing—nonfiction/essays, fiction, poetry, or mixed-genre forms. (And they may niche-down further into sub-genres of these forms.) For the purposes of this course, we look at any publication online, in e-book, or in print that will publish short fiction, creative nonfiction (essays, memoir), hybrid writing, and poetry. The publications many people are familiar with are The New Yorker, or The Paris Review, but there are many, many lit mags out there and part of the course involves getting to know the various and vast lit mag landscape.
When will the Q&A Calls be held?
Attending our live Q&A calls is optional. You can join as many as you can.
For each session, I set up three initial calls then add more depending on your cohort’s time zones and availability. Together we will make it work for everyone!
Video replays are also available after each live call and I make sure the replays are extremely helpful to writers who cannot attend live.
What writing do I need to have prepared?
It is ideal, but not required, that you have a draft submission of creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, or mixed-genre writing prepared for this course. Don’t worry if it’s not “there” yet—we’re going to work on this in the course.
Will you provide feedback on my writing?
Yes! I give editorial feedback on your submission package and respond to every assignment you submit during the course. I also answer questions, including about your writing and writing craft, in group calls and on our private community channel.
How big is the course cohort?
To provide a more personalized and supportive experience, I cap the Lit Mag Love course at 12 participants.
This group size allows me to offer individualized attention, and writers benefit from small group coaching calls and detailed personal feedback.
Together, we create a space where you can comfortably engage and grow as a writer. I do this in particular for my fellow introverts, to ensure that every voice is heard and valued.
Since spaces are limited, secure your spot soon if you’d like to join my intimate and tailored course experience.
When does the course start and end?
The course session starts on May 13 and ends on June 24, 2025. Each course session runs for six weeks and writers can work at their own pace, with lots of motivation to complete the assignments, including deadlines to submit their writing for my feedback.
I can't make this session. When's the next one?
I expect to offer Lit Mag Love again in September 2025.
How much does the course cost?
The full course price is 649 USD and I offer sliding-scale pricing options of 599 USD for recently unemployed writers or writers experiencing reduced income and who do not have access to generational or personal wealth, 499 USD for writers experiencing financial insecurity and who do not have access to personal or generational wealth and/or savings, and reconciliation pricing of 479 USD is for BIPOC +/ Trans writers.
If it is easier for you to pay in installments, you can pay any over four monthly payments.
Do you offer a sliding scale for lower-income writers?
Yes. I offer a sliding-scale rate for writers experiencing unemployment/income loss, and financial insecurity. I also offer reconciliation pricing for BIPOC +/ Trans Writers.
Sliding-scale pricing options are 599 USD for recently unemployed writers or writers experiencing reduced income and who do not have access to generational or personal wealth, 499 USD for writers experiencing financial insecurity and who do not have access to personal or generational wealth and/or savings, and reconciliation pricing of 479 USD is for BIPOC +/ Trans writers.
If it is easier for you to pay in installments, you can pay over four monthly payments.
Am I ready to take this step for my writing?
You read all the FAQs and made it to the bottom of this LONG page, so I think you answered your own question. (Yes!)
Still Have Questions? Use this form to ask me:
I highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to publish in literary magazines, but really any writer who is interested in joining a community and honing their craft.