THE WRITE PLACE

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Inaugural Issue 2011.09.01 • Issue 2 - 2011.12.01

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Welcome to The Write Place, a publication dedicated to the English-language community of the Greater Montreal Area.

As writers, we've all been there. A wonderful idea for a story pops into our heads and we want to set it down on paper as quickly as we can but, no matter how hard we try, it never seems to come out the way we see it in our minds. Or it flows onto the paper and it reads (to us) like a best seller... and we have no idea how to go about getting it published. Or we send it off to a publisher and it comes back with a form letter saying that it needs a lot of work before it can be published and you don't know where to turn (I'm being kind. You mostly get polite missives telling you that your piece isn't a good enough fit.)

The Write Place's raison d'être is to help those writers who might need some help in perfecting their craft. Every three months, we publish a newsletter filled with little tricks and bits of information that you can use to become a better writer and help your on your road to getting the Great Canadian Novel out of your head and into the stores. We also take your submissions and publish the best of your work in our pages to share with the world (ok, our distribution hasn't progressed outside the Montreal area yet, but we're working on it.)

Our first issue has finally hit the stands, and we are very proud of the work everyone involved has done to make this dream a reality. We have some remarkable pieces in it, including a comprehensive Ten Steps to Self-Publishing article by Christina Manolescu, another by Steven manners on The Art and Business of Mentoring, an insightful piece by Anne Fotheringham on Back Story: When to Use It or Lose It and even a Pro vs Con debate between Beverly Akerman and Steven Manners over whether the internet is useful to writers in Writers Must Have an Internet Presence. David Reich graces our pages with a fine story of deceipt and treachery in The Almost Perfect Crime.

We also have My Vision, a short introduction to the paper, and The Write People, a quick insight into one of our consultants, both by our publisher, Rosalie Avigdor, as well as No Running in the Hallways!, a quick inspirational editorial by Managing Editor Joseph Richard Mannella. Of course, feel free to peruse our Submission Guidelines, there for those of you who'd like to get their feet wet as quickly as possible.

We hope you'll partake of the written nourishment we have provided and put it to good use in your journey to get published, or simply your efforts to polish up that manuscript for your own benefit. For now we will publish every third month, so the next issue will come out in the beginning of December 2011, giving you plenty of time to forage through your piles of stories to come up with something to submit before the end of October deadline. You can submit anything you want. Be the first to have a poem published in The Write Place. Make people laugh, or cry, or run in hysteria from the room after having read your wonderful short story in our pages. Even write a letter to our Editor, telling him how much you love the story from the present issue, or how much you disagreed with the opinion expressed by one of our contributors. We will do our very best to keep our paper interesting and topical. We want it to become something of which we can all be proud, reader and writer alike.

Oh, and in case you missed it, we have a small contest running, to give a name to our illustrious mascot, the Beaver with a Book watching over this page in the top left corner of your screen. Send your ideas to our e-mail (the.write.place@hotmail.com) with "Beaver Name Contest" in the subject line and we'll choose the best of the best for publication in our next issue where you can vote on the one you like most. Don't forget to include your name and city of residence with your entry (You know, so we can say "this entry was submitted by johnnylovespopsicles234 of noneofyourbusiness, Ontario".) There are no prizes, of course, except for the satisfaction of being able to gloat to your friends about having your name in the paper (you can gloat even more if you get a story or poem published.)

Come along on our journey. Friends are always welcome.