Featured Client: Saramanda Swigart

Our featured client, Saramanda Swigart, is thrilled to be writing fiction almost full time after years of writing ad copy and corporate literature. Her work has appeared in Superstition Review, Caveat Lector, and other journals. Saramanda’s been featured in Superstition Review’s  Authors Talk podcast series and also received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train! Watch Saramanda’s video and read on to learn how Writer’s Relief made a big difference in her writing life.

In Saramanda Swigart’s Own Words:

Writing is often pleasurable; sometimes painful. But for this writer, the submission process was always painful. Research, retrofitting the cover letter for each publication, the avalanche of rejections—there was nothing about the process that didn’t sting. Sending work out was the one aspect of writing I felt I was “doing blind,” haphazardly, and without a set strategy. Inevitably, I’d sit amongst my rejection letters, scanning them for any words of encouragement, thinking maybe I’m kidding myself that I can get published. My average was forty rejections per acceptance.

Then I discovered Writer’s Relief. I nervously sent them my work, and when they accepted it, I anxiously pulled the trigger for them to send out an experimental short story that had been rejected about fifteen times. They sent it out to twenty-five hand-selected markets. To my utter shock, eleven of the magazines offered to publish it. That’s the power of a targeted campaign.

So. Thanks to Writer’s Relief, writing is much less painful for me. By removing the sting of the submission process, they’ve left me to what I enjoy—the writing itself. Now I watch piece after piece get placed like magic, and the rejections—fielded first by Writer’s Relief and sent along to me with a warm and encouraging note—have lost their bite.

Writing is a lonely act; but now I have a team behind me. I like my team. I feel like they’re on my side. I’m excited each time I get correspondence from them—even when it’s a rejection—because it feels that each rejection is a step toward something greater. How many writers get to say that getting published is, rather than a solitary and doleful event, a collaborative one? I’m so grateful to Writer’s Relief for everything they’ve done for me, and I’m sticking with them for as long as I write!

More About Saramanda Swigart

Saramanda’s short stories have appeared in Superstition Review, Fogged Clarity, Caveat Lector, The Literati Quarterly, Ragazine, The Penmen Review, and Thin Air. Saramanda is working on a collection of interlocking stories; a novel, Meaning Machine, about a family’s incompatible coping strategies in the face of loss; and a modern translation of the more salacious stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She has an MFA from Columbia University, with a supplementary degree in literary translation. After having lived and worked in Italy, New York, and Dubai, Saramanda makes her home in San Francisco, where she teaches at City College.

Find out more about Saramanda Swigart at her website.