Ten reasons why

our online journal

would be a good choice

in your writing courses

1.

We publish only creative non-fiction, no magazine articles,
no newspaper columns, and most importantly,
no chapters from books or excerpts of longer works posing as essays.
(One of our persistent complaints as teachers has always been
the “essay anthology,” which in reality,
only contains a handful of true, unedited essays.)

2.

We’re an annual, so each new issue of Under the Sun is genuinely new,
with all new selections…not superficially new, with a new cover
and a handful of additions and deletions
(and we are free of charge).

3.

We’re of manageable size.
Your students can actually read the entire issue over
the course of one semester, not a small fraction.

4.

All the essays we publish are brand new, written by writers still breathing.
Should your students read essays such as
“Shooting an Elephant” and “Once More to the Lake”?
Of course. They’re brilliant.
But use Under the Sun as your primary text.

5.

Variety.
We’ve got serious and funny, long and short, traditional
and non-traditional, “simple” and “challenging.”
Variety of style and subject matter, especially over-looked subject matter,
is what the essay, since Montaigne, has always been about.

6.

We’re teachers of writing ourselves. We know your problems.
We’re also writers, with essays of our own that have
appeared in such distinguished journals as
North American Review, Gettysbury Review and Michigan Quarterly Review.

7.

We’ve tested Under the Sun as a text in our own classes,
and our students overwhelmingly agree that it is much more valuable
to them — and much more enjoyable — than a “real” text.

8.

We’re affordable because we are online and free of charge.
(with no additional costs for shipping and handling).

9.

We won’t pull any fast ones on you by publishing
“special” or “thematic” issues that we think are
cool but that you can’t use as a teacher. Our sole mission is to
publish the best creative non-fiction that comes to us each year.
Period.

10.

We print good stuff.
Ask the editors of The Best American Essays who have found our essays notable each year.
Ask Grant Travey of Literary Magazine Review, who said that
Under the Sun “. . . inspired [my students] to write about quiet things,
normal everyday things . . . [and] not to be afraid
to write about [themselves], and more importantly, to write ‘from the gut.'”

 

That’s 10 reasons.

We could have given you more, but God didn’t, so we won’t either.
Our Offer
Each issue of Under the Sun (published each summer, in time for
the following academic year) contains the highest quality essays we
received in manuscript for that year.
Why are we called Under the Sun?
Because of the quote we’re using from J.B. Morton (you’ve probably never
heard of him either – we hadn’t) as our permanent epigraph:
“An essay is a short piece of prose in which the author
reveals himself in relation to any subject
under the sun . . .“

 

Thanks for taking the time to read yet another text-pitch — albeit for an online publication.

Heidemarie Z. Weidner, Editor