As far as submissions and writing for QO goes, I have been thinking about this a bit more and want to reiterate a few things I have posted previously.

The first is that I want the quiet part to be the most important part. I want this to be a quiet place away from the warbling of the world. I want these essays to be quiet little safe havens. Quiet little clearings in the deep dark forests of the world. A calm breath, a single exhale, a few moments in the eye of the hurricane.

I am not looking for personal essays where you have overcome some obstacle. The personal essay often involves triumphing over odds, or learning a lesson after some calamity or inner shake-up. This is not that. I want very little conflict. Just enough tension to hold the sentences together. Think: quiet. Calm. Tranquility. The topic, the pacing, the sentences should all reflect this calm and quiet.

I want every essay to clearly be what it is. In other words, if we all read an essay, we should all generally agree what the essay is about. The first essay I posted on here was about holding hands. It had a main theme that was easily identifiable.

I will let you know when I am open to submissions, or I will reach out personally to people who have expressed interest. If you want to express interest, drop a comment that you would like to write for QO, and I will add you to the list. (Please note the list is long and I am only publishing one writer a month, so this will not move quickly. If I ask you to send me something, please don’t send messages asking when I’m going to get around to reading it. Normally literary journals take anywhere from 2-6 months. I will respond within a few days in most cases, and will let you know if it’s going to be longer.)

As another example, I am sharing an old essay below on beautiful things. It’s late August and I can feel fall coming, so here is a list of things I found beautiful during the fall a few years ago.

A List of Things I’ve Found Beautiful Recently

The way the sky looks in late October. Like there’s more of it or you want more of it. Of anything. Of everything. In October the sky makes me feel like I could almost—just almost—get away with calling it cerulean. Maybe even azure.

Yesterday the weather turned. The warm afternoon went overcast and cold. The wind came over the Rockies and down out of Colorado. It gained strength across Western Kansas and when it got here it sounded lonely.

And now the leaves are changing colors and when I walk in the afternoon I see them scuttling along in the wind. I think of a John Irving novel. A John Knowles novel. I feel like fall makes me more contemplative. More aware of time and tide. More aware of beautiful things and why, sometimes, they hurt.

Which is beautiful.

Jennifer letting loose the last butterfly in late September. The evening light on her arms as she reached into the cage. The way she waited for its wings to settle before coaxing it out. How she held it. How she let it go. There’s beauty in both those things, and I mean that metaphorically, like a butterfly winging its way skyward means something else after it’s gone.

Neighbors waving me to me when I walk in the evening. A simple, good faith gesture. A raising of the hand, a sign of acknowledgment, a kindness, which is always beautiful.

Listening. When was the last time you listened to your breath or the wind in the October trees? I believe it’s beautiful how often they sound alike, as if the earth were exhaling only for us.

Friday night I watched my old high school play football. They stream it live on Youtube now. While watching, I recalled the fight song. The pregame ritual of running onto the field. The way, on November nights, the air starting to whisper of winter, a high school football game in a small town is a fine place to be.

During the game the camera person occasionally caught a bit of the crowd on the far side of the field. There was a narrow strip of grass where kids had scratched up a game of their own. They had split into sides and were lined up against one another. I imagine, because I remember nights like that, that they were smiling, eyes bright as stadium lights.

I have a grandson now, and he is beautiful. The way my mother’s face changes when she sees him is also beautiful, as is the way his mother, my daughter, holds him. When he looks at me after not seeing me for several months, he seems as if he is uncertain for a moment before starting a smile that makes me want to pinch his fat little cheeks. To tickle his little belly until he can’t stand it anymore and when he begins to laugh and squirm away from me I laugh loudly as well, because sometimes we don’t have enough room inside us to contain all the things we feel.

Not having cancer anymore is beautiful. So is perspective. It’s easier to see, after such a thing, all the ways you matter. And all the ways you don’t. Let me say my ego is a lot smaller, and my heart a lot bigger.

Fill in your own here. Something that makes you smile. Something that makes you happy. Steam from your coffee cup rising in the early morning in a quiet house. A football game on a Friday night. A grandson whose smile gives you hope everything might turn out okay after all. Settling into bed late at night beside the one you love more than anything else in this world. Whatever floats your boat. Whatever lights your candle. Whatever makes you feel beautiful inside, and that the world is beautiful around you.

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To Have and To Hold

Some time in the night Jenn takes my hand. Asleep, she reaches out to me, and we hold each other through the long dark. I wake to find our hands clasped on her chest or her hand lightly resting on mine and these mornings I lie in the darkness listening to her breathe, wondering if it’s possible to be overcome by the enormity of the love we hold.

Later, we’ll walk around our Midwestern neighborhood holding hands. In the cool summer morning she’ll take my hand or I’ll take hers and we’ll go along conjoined, two people who have decided to face this world together. I find comfort in the way her slightly smaller hand fits into mine. The smell of soap on her skin when I raise her hand briefly to kiss the back of it. The way she squeezes once-twice to let me know she’s here, like when I woke from cancer surgery confused and scared and then, through the fog, felt her hand on mine, her calm voice like a beacon beckoning me home.

My grandmothers loved holding hands, both of them. My maternal grandmother would hold hands with her grandchildren for hours, before they got big enough to get away from her, which recalls for me holding hands with my daughters on the way home from the hospital, their tiny fingers gripping the smallest one of mine. I held my daughters’ hands walking them to the bus stop in the morning. As we crossed a busy street in the city where we used to live, back when we all lived in the same city and could hold hands any time we wanted.

The last time I took my now-grown younger daughter to see my paternal grandmother they sat side by side and held hands the whole time we talked. They rubbed each other’s arms as if touch could somehow restore lost time, or at least recall it, and who am I to say it can’t? I can still remember my mother kneeling by the side of the bed, her warm hand on my forehead, 50 years later, which means time is a construct and touch the key.

Let us also not forget then the exhilaration of holding hands in a movie theater on a first date 40 years ago, the fingers intertwining in the changing light of the silver screen, or the back of the school bus on the way to a basketball game in 8^th grade, or a night in the city of your twenties, holding hands with someone you suspected you might be falling for, a delicious pit of fear forming inside you at this new unfolding.

We touch hands when we meet. When we leave one another. We raise our hands to one another and wrap our arms around one another. If you live in the Midwest you do it again and again and again every time you say goodbye, which is a shortened form of “God be with you,” which might also mean “God’s hand watch over you.”

When my grandfather died my father was holding his hand, and I know that was a comfort to both of them. It is a comfort to me now. I suspect when I die I’ll want to be holding someone’s hand. To be honest I’m a coward, so it’d be nice to have someone’s hand to hold there at the end so I know I’m not alone. We first learn the world by touching it. I suspect we’ll go out the same way, that even after the lights are shuttered and our final breath is fading into forever we’ll still feel the warmth of a last touch. A daughter’s fingers, the soft brush of a lover’s lips, the last lingering vestige of how we hold the world in our tiny, tiny hands.

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For those of you who want to contribute to this page, I have listed some parameters below. For those of who just want to read, the parameters will give you an idea of what I want this page to be.

As I started thinking about how to describe this project I quickly ran into a problem. The problem with giving guidelines is that as soon as I set a parameter, I have shaped your idea of what is allowable or wanted, which leaves me in the position of giving nebulous guidelines.

First—there is not a specific type of essay I am looking for. I just want good, quiet essays, on any topic. I like things you might otherwise not notice—call it the miracle of the mundane. The ordinary made holy by the careful attention we give it. But I also like weird stuff. Out of the ordinary ideas, or new perspectives on old ideas. I am interested not in navel-gazing but in nature-observing, and nurture-giving. Beauty-gathering. Poem-ing in essay form. Lyrisizing on language.

I want short quiet essays of emotional resonance. Someone asked me for examples, and I hesitate, because as soon as I name a writer, that writer then becomes a model. But the great nature essayists wrote essays (somewhat) like I am imagining, and by that I mean they wrote meditations on what they saw and witnessed in the world: Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, et al, as did some old stuffy European dudes named Montaigne and Rilke. John McPhee’s Oranges is a book-length essay that meanders everywhere in a delicious way, but which starts with how people around the world eat oranges for breakfast, and that would make a fabulous fit for our purposes here. Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere sits on my writing desk at all times, and may be the model in my inner mind for the type of essays I would enjoy seeing (playful, whimsical, deeply in love with language).

As another example, my first contribution to this page will be on holding hands (700 words). I also want to write about the various things Jenn and I see on our walks around the neighborhood: the mushroom rings that appear after a rain above the ghosts of old oak stumps, the neighbors who plant milkweed for Monarch caterpillars, the way the light looks when a late afternoon storm moves across the Kansas prairie.

What I do not want:

I do not want politics. The plan is to see the world without any politics. Or, rather, to see the things in this world that aren’t inherently political, like holding hands, or a mountain at sunrise, or scorpions.

I don’t want there to be anything other than the essay itself. I don’t want the piece explained (it should stand on its own). I don’t want you to start with Dear Reader. I just want to enter the essay.

New stuff only. I am not looking for already-posted Substacks that might qualify as a quiet observation. I am looking for new, unposted-before essays specifically for this. Later I might change this, but for now I want all original stuff.

No AI. This goes without saying, because the people I am going to ask to write for this page would not use AI. But no AI.

Melancholy is fine. Sadness is fine, loss is fine, mourning is fine. But I’d prefer these to be more positive than negative. More hopeful than hopeless. The point is to make readers feel better in a quiet and contemplative way, even if the essay includes loss or hardships (especially if).

Length: I don’t want to police length, but I’d like these to be short, say 1000 words or fewer. I say this because short, concise essays work better for what I am envisioning. I love your big long braided essays, but for this think of a short morning meditation. Think: a few sips of early coffee. I want these essays to be read early in the morning and set the mood for the day. I want them to make people feel a little better, or a little more alive, or just a little more aware of the quiet beauty all around us.

Really I want to see what you come up with. Isn’t that why we read our favorite writers every week, to see where they are going to take us?

I want to see where you take me.

If you want to write for this page once, drop a comment saying so. If you would like to have a recurring role writing for this page, drop a comment saying so. For now I am reaching out to people who have expressed interest. It’s a long list. Be patient, please.

If you’d like to support the page, please consider subscribing, restacking, liking, commenting, and telling others—word of mouth really, really works, so smash that like button, as the kids on YouTube say.

Thanks for being here. My first post will go up Sunday morning.

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