Editor Insights: Chicago Story Press
Founder and Editor Anne E. Beall on submissions, rejection, and trying to understand people we don’t like
This week, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Anne E. Beall, the founder and editor of Chicago Story Press, which is both a press and a literary magazine. The magazine is focused exclusively on publishing creative nonfiction and essays (so please save your fiction and poetry for other journals).
Anne is an award-winning author and social psychologist who has written eight nonfiction books, including The Compassionate Writer, which is a craft book about how to make writing better and easier through compassion. Her work has been featured in People Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Toronto Sun, NPR, NBC, and WGN. Her stories and essays have also appeared in numerous literary journals. She holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from Yale—so yes, she can absolutely overanalyze your childhood.
During this Q&A, Anne and I discuss what she is and isn’t looking for in submissions, how to handle rejection, and the importance of having compassion for your characters (especially the ones you don’t like).
Tell me a little about Chicago Story Press and what you like to publish?
Chicago Story Press was started in 2020, and then we started the literary journal in 2024. Our focus has always been on a really good story—that’s what we love more than anything. I started the literary journal because people don’t buy books as much as I would love, and I wanted to promote authors in a more significant way. Because our literary journal is free, authors can share their pieces with large numbers of people. The hope was that we would get lots of people coming to the website, and in fact, we get over 70,000 people visiting our website because of the wonderful pieces they can read for free.
The story is really the focus of what we do. We’re interested in a nonfiction story, but we’re interested in something that has a perspective, something where there’s an insight that’s gained. So, it’s not just telling me, “Oh, I went on this great motorcycle ride, and I fell off, and oh my gosh, I’ll never go on a motorcycle again.” It has to be something like, “I went on this motorcycle ride, and I realized things about myself that I didn’t know, and I understood things about the world that I didn’t realize,” but it’s done through a story. A story that helps us really understand you as a person or understand something about the world. That’s what we care about—that it’s a story that tells us something important.
How many submissions do you get each month?
In 2024, I think we got around 30 submissions a month. Now it’s around 75 submissions per month. In 2024, about 18% of pieces that were submitted were accepted. In 2025, it’s 7%, and it seems to be going down. We have one of the higher acceptance rates among literary magazines, and we don’t have a problem with that. We actually like that we’re a place where people who have never published before can see their piece in print for the first time. We like working with first-time authors as much as we like working with multi-published authors.
What makes a submission stand out to you in a good way?
So, I read everything. Every single thing that is submitted. Pieces that capture me most tend to throw me into the action pretty quickly and make it very clear what the stakes are early. I do this for a reason: because we’re an online journal, we lose eyes very quickly. If a story doesn’t grab people from the beginning, it’s not going to do well when it gets published.
Besides taking too long to get into the story, what are other common reasons you vote no on a piece?
I tend to vote no on pieces where I start reading about a character, and I have no idea who the character is, and it’s a key character. I was reading this piece this morning, where the writer was talking about someone important to them, and they kept saying, “you were there for this, and there for that, and you’re a big part of my life,” and I’m like, is this a wife? Is this a sister? Is this a brother? Is this a mother? Is this a father? I have no idea. The author seemed to have it in their head that they don’t need to tell me who this character is, and why they’re important, and I’m already confused. And if I’m confused, I don’t think my readers are going to be any less confused. They aren’t going to take the time to figure this out. So, that’s one of the big things, unclear pieces.
Another reason I vote no is because sometimes it’s a story that we’ve heard before. For instance, I saw a literary magazine that asked writers not to submit stories about a parent’s death, because that’s one of the most common things that people submit. Many writers will submit a story about their parent’s death, because it’s such a life-changing event. Having lost two parents, I understand what that’s like, but unless there’s a different take on it, or something unusual about that parent’s death, we’re not interested in rehashing a story that’s been told quite a few times. We do accept pieces about parents’ deaths, by the way, but it has to be a story that gives us a perspective that hasn’t been heard.
The other big reason is that there’s no story. You’ve given me great descriptions of a meadow, you’ve shown me you have this beautiful language, but I don’t understand what the story is. I don’t have an arc here. I don’t understand what the resolution is. I don’t have, in essence, a story. As a result of reading your work, I want to have a perspective I didn’t have before, and that’s really important.
One of the interesting things about writers is that there’s this big thing about showing and not telling. I’m actually a person who believes in both showing and telling. As human beings, we have the same life events. We all get sick, we all fall in love, we all care for someone or something, we all have felt afraid. But it’s the level of reflection about it, I think, that can be quite different. And we take a fair bit of reflection in our pieces, because this is really about perspective. It’s really how you went about understanding an experience in your mind, and what you have to say about it.
Do you have any other submission pet peeves?
I do not like title pages at all. I don’t like this whole big long title page with your address and your phone number and your social security number. Thank you, no. I don’t need it. I also do not like it when people send fictional pieces, because we are a creative nonfiction journal. I also do not love it when people send me submissions that are over the word count. We have a 3,000-word limit, and I almost always will reject you if you’re over that limit. The other thing is, don’t send me poetry. I don’t publish poetry. Please don’t put pieces in there with tons of poetry in between the text. I am not a poet, I have no ability whatsoever to evaluate or edit poetry.
I’ve also received pieces that are mostly about a dream, which is basically fiction. That doesn’t work for me either.
As an accomplished author yourself, do you have any tips for how writers can tell when a piece is ready to submit?
As a writer, I’ve made every mistake that writers make. What I have learned over the years is that often, we fall in love with our own work, particularly right after we’ve finished it. Oh, I just wrote this piece today, it’s ready to go! We all have that experience. What I have learned is to put it away. Go back to it a couple days later, or a week later, and you won’t be as in love with it. Let your work sit on a shelf for a bit. When you come back, you can be much more objective about it.
And then I give my work to other people to read and see if they are getting what I’m getting out of it. That helps a lot. I run several critique groups, and I get my work regularly critiqued. Not every comment is useful, but it does give you a sense of what’s working and what’s not.
How do you feel about cover letters and bios?
I’m not a huge fan of cover letters. I am a fan of the bio, which is 50 words or less. If we publish your piece, we take that exact bio and put it at the bottom of your piece. So, I appreciate bios that are written in third person. Cover letters I don’t care about so much. Basically, I care if it’s a simultaneous submission and that you’ll let me know if it’s accepted elsewhere. One of the things that really differentiates us is we’re very fast. We typically get responses out within a month, which is unusual.
Are there any topics you wish you saw more of?
I tend to get political things that are so clearly one way or the other. Oh, this is all bad, or this is all good, but I’m looking for something that has depth and complexity. That’s why I wrote the book The Compassionate Writer. When you look at things with understanding, they open up to be much more complicated than you think.
One thing I absolutely hate are essays that go on and on about how awful your mother is. I do not care to learn that your mother was the worst person ever and that you can’t believe you made it out of that situation. The villain-victim thing, I don’t go for. I’d rather hear that your mother was a terrible mother, but that she tried in some ways to be a mother at times, and that you’ve learned a lot about the world and yourself from that experience. I get a lot of mother essays where the person just goes off on how terrible their mother is. I think motherhood is difficult and many mothers disappoint, but I’d like to see a more nuanced view of things than a strict compilation of how terrible your mother was.
I’d like to see more essays where the writer tries to understand somebody that they don’t like. That’s what I would love to see more of. When my mother was alive, she and I had a very complicated relationship, and in many ways, she was not a great mother, but I spent time trying to understand her, and some of the best work that I’ve written is stuff where I really had compassion for her, even though she was a problematic mother. So, I think that’s the kind of stuff I’d like to see more. I’d like to see more of us understanding something or someone that doesn’t come easily to us, that we don’t really, truly grasp.
What does the editorial review process look like?
I do a full read-through of what comes in, and there are basically a bunch of pieces that get rejected right away, and there’s occasionally something that gets accepted right away. Then there’s a bunch of stuff that goes into the ‘maybe’ pile, where I feel like I have to read it again a couple days later. I often find that if I keep thinking about a piece in the ‘maybe’ pile over a couple of days, it will often go into the acceptance pile. At that point, we send out acceptance letters, and then we edit every piece that gets accepted—every single one. After the acceptance goes out, I send out the edited version a few days or a couple weeks later. It typically goes through about 3 or 4 rounds of editing. They can accept or reject my edits, but we have a collaborative process. In general, the authors are happy to have another set of eyes go through their work, and typically, the stronger the writer, the more they love the editing process. Once it gets finalized, it typically gets published within a month or two.
The reason why I love running a lit journal is I love being on the other side of ‘yes,’ I love being able to work with authors, I love reading the stories. I love the fact that when I publish something for someone, they’re like, “This is the first time I’ve ever been published, and this has made my whole year.”
What advice do you have for someone who wants to submit to Chicago Story Press?
I would say something that all editors say, which is to please take a look at several pieces and get a sense for what we publish. We do publish on a wide variety of topics, everything from autism to a spouse’s death to rearing children. But take a look at what we do and then think about what it is that your story is saying, what’s a perspective you can give us through your story. What’s something that you can help us understand? Read some pieces first, though!
Do you have any tips for how to deal with rejection?
Rejection is the norm rather than the exception, and you will get more rejections than acceptances. And often, rejections don’t have very much to do with you, and they don’t mean that you’re not a good writer. They don’t indicate that your work is crappy. It may indicate something around fit, it may indicate something around that particular literary journal, or that particular agent or publisher. The market is saturated with so many writers, so many pieces, and there’s so few literary journals, and there’s so few agents, and so few publishers.
I do think you can use rejection as something that spurs you on. If you send an essay out 20 or 30 times and nobody wants it, have somebody else look at it. What do they think? Are they getting the idea you were trying to get across? Is anything unclear?
Writing is a game of tenacity. That’s what writing is. Those of us who have been doing it so long know that. You just keep at it and keep at it. And you have some successes along the way, but you have a lot of rejections.
I went to an awards ceremony recently for award-winning authors who had books published, and almost every single person was astonished they had won an award. They were very uncertain that they truly deserved it. I mean, this is a very difficult business, and we’re up against these tremendous odds. Very few people are going to actually get as many pieces published as they want. So, you can’t take it too personally, and you have to use that as gas for your engine, to become better, and to just keep at it.
Words are medicine, you know? The words that we give to others are medicine, and whether one person reads it, or a million people read it, it can make a big difference.
About Chicago Story Press
Opens to submissions monthly around the 9th/10th (closes at the end of each month)
Publishes essays/creative nonfiction of 1,000-3,000 words
Acceptance rate: ~7% (per Anne)
Average response time: 1 month
Receives ~75 submissions per month
$5 to submit via Submittable
Pays $25 per published piece
👋 Hi there, and thanks for reading! I’m Janelle Drumwright, a writer, teacher at The Writers Studio, former editor at Carve Magazine, and former reader at The Masters Review. I help writers strengthen their work and submit to literary magazines. Interested in working together? Visit janellewrites.com for more info.
Thank you so much for this, Janelle!