Call for Disabled Columnists
Disability Acts is looking for monthly columnists
**Submissions are currently closed while we review the ones we have received. When we open them again, we’ll note it here. Thank you to those who have submitted.**
DISABILITY ACTS, this magazine here, is looking for a few — 2, 3, maybe 4, columnists to write monthly columns for the magazine. Columns can be essays, rants, observations, or all of these — and they should be nonfiction.
Propose a theme. Write a column for us once a month. We’ll edit it and publish it. We still cannot pay (donations received updates are on our About page), but we can promise that we will support you, nurture you, and never judge you. We’ll never question your truth.
Are you interested? Awesome! Send Kelly and Katie an email at disabilityacts@gmail.com with your proposed theme, proposed column title, and a short (2–3 sentence) pitch for your first column. Also include a link to other writing you’ve published around the internet. If you haven’t published anything else before, please include a full draft of your first column submission.
As we get questions about the columnist positions, we’ll post FAQs below. We’ll post at the TOP of this call when the positions are filled. If you still see it, then we’re still accepting pitches. Heck, we might keep accepting columnist pitches forever. We love working with columnists. We love BEING columnists. Columnists rock.
FAQs
Q. How long should the columns be?
A. Anywhere from 900–1500 words. Longer is okay, but not more than 2000 words. Shorter is not okay because you won’t have time to complete your story, most likely.
Q. Why aren’t these paid positions?
A. Great question! The short answer is, we have no money, and the editors run this magazine on a purely volunteer basis.
The longer answer is on our submissions page, but I’ll paste that information here:
“The editors of D/A are also freelance writers; therefore, we don’t think it’s crass to talk about money. Right now, D/A does not pay. That’s because we have no money. We’re just friends who thought it would be great to volunteer our time to create space for disabled writers to publish their work. We volunteer our time to edit and publish pieces that wouldn’t otherwise be out there, and we think that time is worth it.
We are working on raising money to pay writers via crowdsourced fundraising. We have a tipjar on our main menu. Send your friends there. Every dollar counts. Once we have a sustainable fund, we’ll start paying writers for new writing. But we don’t expect to make any money or see money pour in. Disabled people are poor. In our fantasy, monied normates fund us. Wow, how great would that be.
If you can’t write for free, that doesn’t hurt our feelings. How on earth could it? We don’t write for free, either. Here’s the deal: Submit your stories to paying outlets. If you end up with a story you can’t place, then submit it to us. We don’t mind being your last resort. Sometimes the stories that no one else wants are the weirdest, wackiest, very best ones of all.
We’ll keep a running update on donations received below.
Update as of 11/08/2018: We have received $0 in donations.”
Q. What is the deadline.
A. We do not have a deadline. We are accepting submissions until the positions are filled, at which point we will post that the positions are filled in this story.
