$30 to edit up to 32 pages of poetry? Are we nuts or awesome, or both?

BL’s co-founders are now offering editing services, but it wasn't an easy move for us to make.

You can’t throw a rock in the lit world without hitting someone or something that asks writers for money. We’ve never been into reading fees, and we’ve never held a contest. Despite knowing qualified and committed writers who make a living as editors—and being qualified and committed ourselves—we always thought of BL has a non-capitalist venture.

So, here’s why the new project, in both our words:

“Why pay for editing services? Because you trust the editors to help you polish your work. Teneice and I have been doing this for a long time, formally and informally. We ran BL for nearly a decade before asking for a dime from anyone. We don’t really want to take your dimes now, to be honest. What we do want is to apply our skills and experience to a project that will help fund our Best of 10 Years anthology, due out in 2016. And if we can help some writers see their polished poems find homes, and their chapbook aspirations become reality, then that’s just decadent cream cheese icing on the proverbial cake. You can trust us!” –Stacia M. Fleegal

“Our rates are so low, even grad students can afford them. We want to fund our anthology, which means we have to charge SOMETHING, but we want to give writers as much bang for their buck as we possibly can. Lightning fast turnaround, supporting each author’s vision through honest but compassionate critique, real world advice for preparing submissions—these are things writers care about. And we care about writers—working writers, new and emerging writers who might get squeezed out of the market because they don’t have access to a community yet, to another set of eyes or two on their work. We don’t want a high paywall to exclude anyone from publishing quality poetry.”
–Teneice Durrant

 Stay tuned for an opportunity to win a free chapbook consultation!