Editorial Guidelines and How To Information

Publish your work

Thank you for your interest, and welcome!

Before you submit your work for review and publication, please take a moment to review our editorial guidelines to ensure your content is a good match for our site.

Read the editorial guidelines

How to use the site

Welcome! Today you can use this site to do any of the following:

Read and learn about the experiences of others in conflict, wartime and beyond (expressed through stories, diaries (blogs), memoirs, essays, poetry and images). Find links and resources to connect you with other organizations that offer services that meet your needs.

Publish and edit your work. Tell your own story: post essays, poems, blogs, stories, and images. After you post your content, you can edit or update it on the site, and no one else can. You have a free personal account with secure, password-protected access. (Privacy: Your e-mail address is not displayed. We do not share our list).

• Comments. You can have public online conversation about your own or another author’s work by adding comments to initiate conversations or join conversations underway right on the page where the work itself is posted.
• Blogs. A blog is an online public diary that you can update daily or even hourly if you want. Each entry is date- and time-stamped so you can go backward in time and see what you wrote six months ago. You can make this as intimate or businesslike as you want. You can announce upcoming events and then point people to your blog for information, for example. Or, use this as a record of your own process, or your own reading or film-viewing over the next year. Other people can subscribe to your blog so that they are notified when you change it. You can invite other people to subscribe to your blog, or, they can just find it on the website.

Editorial Guidelines

This web site is intended to foster the exchange of ideas from multiple viewpoints in an atmosphere of respect.

Here are a few basic strategies for making your content readable, findable, and effective online:

• Please limit your text submissions to a maximum of 2000 words per piece of content.
• Please limit your images to 50k or smaller.
• It's a good idea to make your paragraphs short enough to be easily scanned on the page. (3-4 sentences per paragraph is a good guideline.)
• Please check the appropriate subject checkboxes that apply to your content. This will help others with similar interests find your material.

All content submitted for publication is reviewed by an editor before being approved for publication. We proofread work and fix typographical or spelling errors, but otherwise do not edit your work.

We welcome divergent opinions and provocative, engaging, interesting content! This site is nonprofit and nonpartisan, and is designed to help foster understanding and imagination that transcends traditional political categories.

That said, we also request that you refrain from submitting material that incites hate, contains threats, or calls for violence. We aim to err on the side of diversity of perspective, but material that provokes violence or hate is inconsistent with the mission of the site and will not be approved for publication.

Register the first time you visit the site

When you register, you create a personal account you can access at anytime to submit or edit your work. When you register, you can sign up to receive our weekly newsletter by checking the newsletter box.

Privacy Statement: We pledge not to share your email address and personal information with any other organization.

To register (and create your own private account and password):

When you see the "Submission Thanks" page, you're done! You are now signed into the site, so you can submit work. Next time you come back, just click Sign In in the upper right-hand corner of the page to access your account and submit or edit your work.

Sign in when you return to the site

You only have to register once, but anytime you want to submit or edit your work after that, you must first sign in to the site to access your own private account.

To sign in:

When you see the "You have successfully signed in," message, you're done! Now you can submit or edit your work.

Submit your work for publication

Before you can submit work, you must first register with the site, or, if you've already registered once, sign in.

To submit your work:

Your work will be reviewed by an editor, and if approved, posted on the site. (We aim to approve work within 2 days of submission, but it's not unusual for it to take us 7, so please bear with us!)

Quickly find your published work

After you've given us 2-7 days to review and post your work, you can quickly find it on the site.

To find your work on the site:

Edit your published work

To edit your content on the site:

Create An Anthology

You can pull together your favorite collection of work -- poems, images, essays, stories, and blogs -- into a customized anthology. Then you can publish your anthology, send it to a friend, or comment on an anthology created by another user. Anthologies are useful for highlighting ideas or themes that matter to you, or communicating ideas, or organizing a discussion in a classroom or living room.

To assemble an anthology:

1. In the left navigation pane, under Browse, click Anthology.
2. On the Anthology page, click Create an Anthology.
3. Give your anthology a Title and a Description.
4. Find and display a poem, image, essay, story, or blog (using Search or Advanced Search).
5. Scroll to the bottom of the item and click on Add to Anthology.

While you are viewing your anthology, you can email it to a friend, print it, edit its content, or delete the anthology and create a different one.

Change your own personal information or password

You might want to change your password to something more memorable, or your email address might change, or your street address or biography might change.

To change your password or personal info:

1. Sign in to access your private account.
2. Click Your Profile at the top of the page.
3. Make the changes you want, and then click Submit at the bottom of the page. Voila!