Redwood Writers Workshop with Rebecca Foust: What makes writing "good" and what makes it publishable 

What makes writing “good” is dedication and hard work. The answers to the second question are as multiple as there are print venues—many thousands. It's a matter of fit (taste), itself multifarious because taste differs with who reads your work, and even this is unstable because first readers & editors at any given venue often change.

This talk will discuss, first, how to make your work the best it can be, and second, how to develop submission systems that will increase your chances of publication, systems sustainable over a period of years that will nurture, not damage, your creativity.

Find Rebecca Foust at rebeccafoust.com.

About Rebecca Foust

Rebecca Foust’s new book, Only, released from Four Way Books in 2022 and received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly.

The author of three chapbooks including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin (2018 Swan Scythe Chapbook Award) and four full length collections including the widely reviewed and acclaimed Paradise Drive, (Press 53 Award for Poetry).

Foust was a Runner Up for the 2023 Missouri Review Editors Prize and in recent years won the Pablo Neruda, CP Cavafy, and James Hearst poetry prizes; other recognitions include fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee, and a Marin County Poet Laureateship featuring events focused on the work of immigrant writers. Recent poems are in The Common, The Hudson Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, POETRY, and elsewhere.

A first-generation college graduate born in Pennsylvania, Foust has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson, a JD from Stanford, and a BA from Smith College and now divides her time between Marin County, CA and Duluth, MN.