Seeking Good Lesbian Travel Writing

Passing along this notice courtesy of Robin Reagler at The Other Mother:

Women’s Wonderlands: Good Lesbian Travel Writing

Gillian Kendall is currently soliciting submissions for a new anthology from University of Wisconsin Press, which will be a sister edition to Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing, edited by Raphael Kadushin. Wonderlands has had terrific success, selling out of its first print run after the W hotel chain made copies of the book available to selected guests.

For this anthology of lesbian travel writing, she does not want travel writing per se please, no destination pieces, no hotel-beach-tour reviews, nothing that would be even remotely right for Conde Nast Traveler. Wonderlands pieces are emphatically not consumer travel pieces; they are impressionistic, literary travel pieces in the tradition of fine travel writing. There are no forbidden topics, but we don’t want anything dogmatic. What Kendall does want is an anthology of personal stories that have a strong travel element. In other words, the stories should be about people, but the place should matter too.

If you’re wondering what that means, read Wonderlands itself — you can order it from Amazon. In this collection by gay men, nearly every piece is beautifully written, moving, funny, or all three. Or read Gillian Kendall’s book, Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet: On a Slow Boat from Shanghai to Texas, or Sailing to the Far Horizon by Pam Bitterman for a guide to the kind of travel narrative sought. After you do, please send your own stories of adventure, of falling in or out of love, of exploration or ex-patriation, or danger or senseless self-indulgence. . .send stories of personal growth, stories of lesbian heart and spirit and, oh yeah, travel.

Women’s Wonderlands will offer a small honorarium to individual contributors, probably $50 USD. Many of the contributors to the first Wonderlands chose to donate their honorarium to support the work of Living Out, a long-standing gay/lesbian list from the U of Wisconsin Press.

Please send your submissions to womenswonderlands( at)gmail. com (replace (at) with @). There is no minimum page length, but please no more than 30 double-spaced pages. You may send work that has been published previously, as long as you retain the rights for republication (we can’t pay permissions fees).

Kendall aims to have a draft collection put together by the end of 2007, so please send her your work no later than Nov. 30th 2007.