Stonepile Writers’ Anthology: Call for Submissions

We are now accepting submissions for Volume III of the Stonepile Anthology.

The Stonepile Writers is a writing group based in Northeast Georgia, and they would like to invite writers from every corner to submit their previously unpublished works. Send in your best poetry, prose, short stories, essays, short memoirs, creative non-fiction, etc. Please e-mail submissions to upng@northgeorgia.edu for review.

Please include all submissions as an attachment (doc or .docx are preferred, but we will accept pdf, rtx, and odt as well). Identify the type of writing (poetry, short story, etc) in the subject line of the e-mail. Please limit any submission to 4000 words. Each author is limited to submitting 5 poems and/or 2 short-stories/essays. Also, include your mailing address in the e-mail. The University Press of North Georgia retains first use copyright of material submitted. After publication, rights revert back to the author.

DEADLINE is May 3, 2013

Click here to read samples from Volumes I & II

From the Introduction to Volume I:

The Stonepile Writers Group began in Dahlonega, GA in 2007.  It joins disparate talents, interests, and life-experiences, just as their region does. The group includes poets, traditional and free verse, nature-oriented and abstract. It includes fiction writers and memoirists, fantasists and steam-punkers. It includes professional writers and so-called amateurs, people from all walks of life: lawyers, bankers, librarians, engineers, instructors, soldiers, nurses, business developers, students, retirees, and more. These writers all share the creative impulse, commonly and uncommonly inspired by their shared home in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, with its red oaks, waterfalls, mountain laurels, and Cherokee markers.

Alice Sampson, Director of the Georgia Appalachian Studies Center, suggested the group’s name: “For several months while in graduate school, I passed Princess Trahlyta’s grave at Stonepile Gap, making my way up the mountain to Woody Gap School…It is also called Stonepile Gap.

“Here one pays respect to her by adding a rock to the Princess’s grave. I see our group as building a place that may be temporary as a pile of rocks, but it is of solid material and composed of individual contributions, plus the name is ‘place-based’.”

Stonepile Gap is the supposed burial site of Trahlyta, who is thought to be a legendary Cherokee Indian princess. Passersby customarily drop a stone on the grave for good luck.

This group’s members individually contribute to their self-, place-, and time-memorials, and are building their own marker on their shared “literary” landscape, reciprocating the deep marks – of joy, sorrow, triumph, and loss – that their landscape and region make on them. They add together poems and stories, like passersby add rocks to Trahlyta’s memorial, thereby building their community’s sense of place just as their community builds these writers’ sense of self.

Learn more about Trahlyta and the Stonepile, which gives the group and anthology it’s name, here.

This anthology is expected to be available for purchase in December 2013.