Dear Reader,

I want you to know I started writing and rewriting this letter no less than ten times. I’ll chalk it up to my status as a recovering perfectionist and someone generally terrible with introductions. To quell any and all inherent awkwardness, here goes nothing – hey, I’m Will Diggs, Managing Editor here at Mouthful of Salt. Since officially commencing my writing career in 2022, so much has transpired in my life. I’ve had fifteen poems featured with ten different publications, including my (un)biased favorite. Then, there are the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations in ‘24 and ‘25, respectively. I’ve also been a guest lecturer at a globally renowned university while hosting workshops with Sepia Soul Live Poetry & Music.

Even with these changes, one thing has remained the same – each time I open up Duosuma or Submittable, I’m beset by some remnants of impostor syndrome and anxiety. As we approach the reopening of our submission window, I want to tackle this universal experience by offering some words of advice and encouragement. For full disclosure, as the title implies, this letter will also hopefully convince you to submit to Granules, more specifically. If you’re asking yourself, what is Granules, I’m glad you asked! It’s an online space where we accept and house pieces on a rolling basis – not just poetry, but creative non-fiction (CNF), fiction, hybrid writing, and visual art. In the last cycle, we published astounding work from authors like Daniel Sheen, Rachael Mullins, and Dylan Tulk to name a few.

Granules provides an opportunity for our editorial staff to highlight and publish standouts throughout the year, outside of our two issues. Whenever you submit to Mouthful of Salt, your work is being considered for our web feature. In some instances, out of a five poem collection, we may identify pieces that we love, but don’t see strongly aligning with the upcoming issue. The team may conclude that such work is better suited for Granules and relay our decision to the author. This is not to suggest that pieces in Granules are simply the reject all-star squad or a soft landing place for almosts.

This is not to suggest that pieces in Granules are simply the reject all-star squad or a soft landing place for almosts.

Don’t get me wrong, being published in an issue or limited call is (and goes) extremely hard. The idea that you’ll be in a table of contents, then later among the third-person bios in the last few pages – it’s all amazing. Perhaps you personally resonated with a theme and furiously wrote or scoured old journals for something that matched. Then you get an email saying we’d be happy to include your work in… Granules, instead of its intended destination, the upcoming issue – cue the rotten produce flinging. This may feel akin to receiving a rejection (something I’m very familiar with) or a let down at the very least. By the way, when I say familiar, I mean intimately so. Let me share a statistic with you: dating back to my first accepted poem, I own a 37.5% submission success rate. In the beginning, I’d feel dejected and unmotivated each time a rejection email made its way to my Gmail account, no matter how warm. I almost always questioned my identity as a writer, ridiculously assuming this was not the career path for me.

I was attracted to Mouthful of Salt because of its interesting name and mission to publish underrepresented writers from marginalized communities. It didn’t hurt that our Editor-in-Chief went to Towson, a school I visited as a child growing up in PG County. For the record, across the four pieces I had published with MoS prior to appearing in the masthead, all of them were in Granules. I like to think of it as our living museum of fine art, a hand-picked place to leisurely or intentionally discover and browse gorgeous writing. Whereas issues and contests may have a theme chosen by our team, our online space features “pieces that are exploratory, urgent, and alive to language.” While this can be broadly interpreted, I’d like to posit a few ideas for those teetering on the edge of “maybe I’ll submit to the web feature or I’ll just wait until they do a theme I like more.” (This is also for the, “I’m saving my best poems for my book” crowd.) To nullify the last point, once you’re ready to release a book, simply ensure you properly credit the original publisher in your notes or acknowledgements. As for the former mentality, to be quite honest reader, there may never be a theme you deeply resonate with – this is true of every literary magazine, not just ours. Granules is an opportunity to submit your finest work, free from relation to our current issue’s theme. We simply want the best of your brain, your most treasured and measured.

While Granules isn’t themed, you’ll notice common threads running through the featured pieces, especially our poetry. They contain evocative imagery manufactured by careful and clever word choices. Any metaphors and similes are tight, unique, and fully developed. The writing can be deeply personal while avoiding droning confessionalism. Other literary devices used can be broadly described by the previous positive adjectives. All work shows attention to revision, using time, attention, and reflection to produce the best results possible. The author’s voice shows up strongly, which is especially evident in submissions of more than one poem. For this reason, when composing submission packets I encourage you to send the maximum number of pieces allowed whenever possible. In the same vein, I’d highly recommend checking out our submission guidelines prior to sending off your collection. This can help you avoid having work rejected for things like including identifying information in poetry files or submitting prose thousands of characters over our permitted word count.

Dear reader, if you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll ponder letting my fellow editors and I consider your work. We’re so excited to open for submissions once again and begin reading later this summer.

Will Diggs

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