Best Women’s Travel Writing vol 13 is open for submission, deadline September 30, 2024, for publication in 2025. I’m so excited to work on my latest travel memoir piece and submit!
- Offassignment: This is my favorite travel memoir writing venue that I only discovered recently. All the columns they publish have a personal, memoir element to them. My favourite column is called ‘Letter to a Stranger’, where you write a letter to someone from your travels who you didn’t get the chance to meet. In their submission section, they offer their favorite examples. My favorite is Lauren Groff’s To the Man I Believe Was Good. This is a paying venue.
- Sierra: The national magazine of the Sierra Club—This magazine publishes a column called Eyewitness account, which is a first person piece, just 625 words, that ‘immerses the reader in a particular experience of nature or social change activism.’ They give links to solid examples on their submission page. This one is my favorite.
- Orion Magazine: This magazine explores environmental and social issues. They publish features between 1000 to 6000 words in the memoir style. The main selling point would be to “expand or challenge our understanding of nature, culture and place, reflecting thoughtful experience with diverse surroundings. As with any submission, it is important to know the magazine. Here’s a representative piece that is memoir focused.
- Hidden Compass: This publication could be a great fit for the right kind of writer. Hidden Compass would appeal to the writer who also wants to focus their personal writing with reporting about the topic. Their stories are literary, story-driven, and well-researched. The stories include beautiful photography, and publications have a unique payment structure. This story is my favorite.
- Moxy Magazine: At the moment, they are closed to submission, but appear to be a good venue for travel memoir writing in that they have specific headings on the submissions page that focus on travel writing and memoir, and give clear examples of work they admire, and why. Their focus and style seems very much in line with the ways I teach travel memoir writing in my how-to guide. This story is my favorite from Moxy Magazine and a good example of the kind of travel memoir writing this publication seems to be looking for.
- The Rumpus: This is a wide-ranging online literary magazine that publishes creative nonfiction of the type we might call travel memoir. They have clear submission guidelines which highlights their publication of essays. I liked this example as it reads like travel memoir under the wider banner of essay or creative nonfiction.
- Afar Magazine: Like Hidden Compass, writing for and submitting to this publication would involve research and reported elements. However, they do publish work where the narrator reveals themselves as ‘I’ and comments on their experience, alongside other quotes and research. They give clear examples on their submission guidelines. Here is one example and another example I think best suit the style of writing I consider within the genre of travel memoir.
- Wanderlust Journal: They give some not very detailed information on their latest submission call here. From reading over their ‘Travels’ section, it’s clear that the pieces they publish are very memoir focused. Have a look at this one, where the writer has a clear quest (conquering a fear) and uses backstory about the origin of that fear to make the quest meaningful. And this one is also quite personal, centering on a journey to help heal the writer, who’s in mourning after a break up and anticipating a cancer diagnosis.
- Here Magazine: They have a section in this magazine called Personal Journal: personal essays on journeys of the mind. That sounds like travel memoir to me! In order to pitch or submit your essay, it looks like you would email their editorial department, information here. I thought this one was a good example, as the quest is in the title: ‘Moving to Mexico: How One Writer Learned to Belong in a New Community.”