Recollection Submission Guidelines
Last Updated December 31, 2020
Thanks for your interest in Recollection. One thing you have to understand about this process is that we are a highly curated memoir-only publication. We don’t care about followers, following, and follow-for-follow. We care about writing, memories, words, people, family, and we care about our writers.
We want to write next to the best memoirists, not the masses. If you don’t read all the way to the bottom of this post, we will know and we will not respond to your request. We take this very seriously and if you don’t, that tells us all we need to know about you.
What is Recollection?
A memoir publication brought to you by Assemblage built for personal narratives and true life lessons.
The Vision
Memoirs are mixed into many publications on Medium and commonly classified as personal essays. Recollection is a niche for those stories, but in a place where they can stand together. Just us. And our memories.
In everything we do at Assemblage, we strive to help our writers achieve maximum growth while being supported by our community, collaboration, and creativity.
This is Recollection.
The Backstory
Assemblage was originally created as an alternative multi-author blog to Medium, on its own website created using Squarespace. The submission and publishing process was much more time consuming than on Medium and in the end, the determination was made that writers would be better served with the publication on Medium. So, we came back to Medium on August 21, 2019.
Since we’ve been back on Medium, our growth has been steady and very promising. In response to that, as well as feedback from our writers and readers, Assemblage created sub-publications to further our mission. Recollection was the third publication created specifically with this in mind.
Assemblage is the continuation of the now-defunct Medium publications, Redoubtable and Uncalendared. We created this publication on April 1, 2020.
In 2020, we published 36 memoirs on Medium from 13 different writers. Yea, we didn’t make it off the ground, but we remain undeterred. Our most-read memoir had 565 views and 291 reads. We had one essay with 20 fans. These numbers are minuscule, but we don’t write for the numbers. We write because we have to get these memories out.
In 2020, we also had to remove our submission requirements and shut down intake because of the digital barrage occurring on Medium, as well as the widespread plagiarism and encouragement to apply everywhere. You can educate yourself on why we did it below. Really, if you want to write here, you should read about why we stopped adding writers.
Do you want to write for Recollection?
Submission Guidelines
By submitting work to Recollection, you are agreeing to all of the following conditions:
- We only accept unpublished drafts. We do not accept works already published on Medium or anywhere else, including personal blogs. We want your best work. Your fresh work. Not something that was never good enough to send anywhere else.
- We don’t accept sloppy seconds. If you submitted your piece to another publication and it got rejected, we don’t want to be your backup. We want you to write personal essays or poems just for Recollection. Period.
- Submissions must be properly tagged with at least one of the following: Life Lessons, Memoir, Personal Narrative, Self, or This Happened To Me. We encourage you to use just one (or two) of these and then (three or) four that match your content.
- Submissions may be edited for spelling, grammar, and format. We will never adjust your content. If we have comments we will send you a private note.
- Submissions must be made through Medium. Here’s how.
- All submissions must include a featured image with proper attribution. If you aren’t going to use Unsplash through Medium, make sure your attribution is correct.
- We don’t publish everything. All stories that are not a good fit will be returned with a private note.
- Once a story has been published in Recollection, we expect it to remain there. If a story is removed, without prior notice, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. If you want to remove the piece, just ask first. It’s your work. We would just want to know why, but we aren’t trying to hold the work against its will.
- We do not support the removal of works for republishing to get better metrics. This will result in immediate removal as a contributor. We aren’t a testing zone to see what works and what doesn’t.
- We will publish only one piece per writer per day.
- We will accept only one submission per writer per day.
- Our turnaround time is quick, always within 24 hours. If you have an intended publication date and time in the future, please include it in a private note on the title. We publish every day of the year, between 10 AM EST and 12 PM EST. If your submission comes in after our publishing run for the day, it will be published the next day.
- If we add you as a writer and you don’t produce a draft in the first week, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. We want writers who are excited to write for us, not to add us to their list of publications.
Read This Before Submitting
- Read this whole thing before submitting the form. There are easy signs to know when you have not read every word. If you fail to read the whole form and we can tell, based on your responses or your profile, we will not respond to your request.
- If you are including Recollection in a spam sham of applying to as many publications as possible, please don’t waste your time or ours. We can tell and we won’t respond.
- If you want to write for Recollection to grow your following first, we are not a good fit for you.
- If you don’t have a favorite Medium writer and/or do not read other people’s words on Medium, you don’t have the commitment to the community that we are looking for.
- If you haven’t been writing on Medium consistently for the past three months, please check back after you have at least 10 published stories before applying to contribute (they don’t all have to be memoirs). We like writers new to Medium, but a lot of people leave. We want writers who have already adjusted to how Medium works.
- If you are worried about how many followers we have, how often our stories get curated, or are interested in pulling works from the publication if they don’t “do well,” we are not the publication for you.
- If you write for any of the following Medium publications, or any publication that is similar to these and their practices, you will not be added as a writer here. There will be no crossover writers. You do not have to remove any old works published there, but you will need 30 days clean before being reviewed for inclusion here. There is no guarantee that if you stop writing there, you will be added here.
- ILLUMINATION
- ILLUMINATION-Curated
- The Innovation
- Never Fear
- An Idea
- Data-Driven Investor
- Paper Poetry
- Be Unique
- About Me Stories
- Passive Asset
If you don’t understand why, read these:
Request to Write for Recollection
We are different than many publications. We don’t want to have 100+ memoirists so all of your memories get lost in the shuffle. We direct-recruit many writers by reading them on Medium. We love reading your micro-memoirs and memoirs.
Writers who have not been asked to write for Recollection will need to fill out the embedded form below. By requesting to be a contributor to Recollection you are agreeing to all of the above Submission Guidelines. New writers are added on a rolling basis.
We do not want an open stable of writers who don’t produce. We want a small group of dependable and honest memoirists who are willing to spill details from their lives weekly to monthly.
Please fill out the form below or click here.
Questions?
Feel free to email Jonathan Greene at jonathan@trustgreene.com with any questions.
This is not an invitation to add him to your email list.
