Please submit only one (​1) story at a time. Additional submissions will be returned unread. Only previously unpublished work will be considered. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but if your piece is accepted elsewhere we ask that you please withdraw it from our system. Novellas and novel excerpts are welcome. Translations are welcome; it is the translator's responsibility to secure rights to the work before it is submitted. 

We suggest reading recent issues of A Public Space to acquaint yourself with work the magazine has published. Subscriptions are available here. We have also made a selection of pieces from the magazine available as part of our Public Access series, including:

Fiction 

“Khushiya” by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated from the Urdu by Matthew Reeck and Aftab Ahmad

“War, Blossoms” by S. J.  Naudé

"Young Lover, New Lover" by Muhammad Aladdin, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

We aim to reply to submissions within four months. If it has been ​more than four months and you have not yet received a response, we will be happy to reply to a query regarding the status of your submission.

Please submit only one (​1) essay at a time. Additional submissions will be returned unread. Only previously unpublished work will be considered. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but if your piece is accepted elsewhere we ask that you please withdraw it from our system. Excerpts are welcome. Memoir is welcome. Long-form cultural criticism is welcome. Translations are welcome; it is the translator's responsibility to secure rights to the work before it is submitted. 

We suggest reading recent issues of A Public Space to acquaint yourself with work the magazine has published. Subscriptions are available here. We have also made a selection of pieces from the magazine available as part of our Public Access series, including:

Nonfiction 

“Meeting Points: Between and In Between Subject and Object” by Cleo Mikutta

“Pita in the Arms of God” by Elena Poniatowska, translated by Christina MacSweeney

We aim to reply to submissions within four months. If it has been ​more than four months and you have not yet received a response, we will be happy to reply to a query regarding the status of your submission.

Please submit up to five (5) poems in one document. Only one submission at a time is allowed; additional submissions will be returned unread. Only previously unpublished work will be considered. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but if a poem is accepted elsewhere, we ask that you withdraw your submission from the system or, if you've submitted multiple poems, that you add a note to your submission letting us know which poem(s) you are withdrawing. Translations are welcome, but it is the translator's responsibility to secure rights to the work before it is submitted. We will make every effort to respond to your submissions within four months, though at times it may be longer. If it has been ​more than four months and you have not yet received a response, we will be happy to reply to a query regarding the status of your submission.

We suggest reading recent issues of A Public Space to acquaint yourself with work the magazine has published. Subscriptions are available here. 

Join us for a long weekend of workshops, literary talks, and evening events at A Public Space's 2025 Weekend Writers' Retreat with Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York.

The APS Weekend Writers' Retreat is an opportunity to nurture new work and expand and explore technique. The retreat will include morning workshops with limited participants (5 to 7 per workshop); afternoon literary talks; and an array of evening events, including readings and a Saturday BBQ. There will also be opportunities for informal conversations with authors and editors and independent generative exercises, as well as complimentary tickets to events at Kaatsbaan's Annual Festival. 

The retreat will be held in person from Thursday, September 11 - Sunday, September 14, the first weekend of Kaatsbaan’s Annual Festival. Tivoli is in New York's Hudson Valley, about two hours from New York City and one hour from Albany. Participants have the option of staying on-site at Kaatsbaan, or off-site. There are several inns and hotels in the area. On-site participants will stay in Kaatsbaan's Dancers' Inn, which provides motel-style accommodations, bucolic views and private baths.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. There is no fee to apply. Applicants must be 21 years of age by September 1, 2024, to apply. Capacity is limited, and applying early is recommended.

TUITION

Tuition is due on acceptance. Retreat participants will receive notice of acceptance, with a link to submit payment.

• Resident (lodging on site at Kaatsbaan and meals included): $1,675
• Non-Resident (lodging off site; attending workshops, lectures and meals in person at Kaatsbaan): $1,475

WORKSHOPS

• J. Mae Barizo: Mapping the Moment

In this multi-genre workshop we'll explore how writing can capture and elucidate the complexity of the world we live in, generating new work that reimagines language and experience in profound ways. Participants will have the opportunity to submit work beforehand (max. 5 pages) and have the work critiqued in class; and through generative exercises and memory work, we’ll also investigate strategies for publishing and revising. We'll examine how writers build the world of the poem, story or essay, communicating the ineffable and the everyday. The aim of the workshop is to create the circumstances that might allow you to create the strongest work of your writing life.

J. Mae Barizo is a prize-winning poet, essayist, and multi-disciplinary artist. A 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, she is the author of Tender Machines, The Cumulus Effect, and a forthcoming book of essays. She is on the faculty of the Creative Writing MFA at The New School and lives in New York City.

• Mary-Beth Hughes: How to Pass, Kick, Run and Fall

Merce Cunningham describes himself in 1965 as a practical man who will make a simple dance set to stories written and read aloud by his friend John Cage. (How to…) The stories will begin at one-minute intervals, no matter how long they are. Ah, practicality. What results is something of beauty (to this beholder.)

An interval of decades and Deborah Hay invites her friend Robert Rauschenberg to illustrate a What-if statement for making dance, playing with dance. He sends her words like: filters, history, now. 

This seems a good moment to explore How-tos and What-ifs and creative friendships. Our workshop will be an opportunity to play and experiment with narrative movement. It will be generative, with lots of in-class exercises and homework. I suggest you bring something you’ve been working on for a while: a shaggy-dog story that feels a bit too shaggy, or a novel long underway, sometimes on fire, sometimes napping. Or interconnected stories that live half in imagination, half on the page. We’ll gather some of these characters, themes, progressions and put them through some new paces. 

Also, please think of an artist whose work you love: Virginia Woolf and Robert Caro, for instance, quite far apart in sensibility, both enamored with Anthony Trollope. Merce Cunningham loved Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Fred Astaire, and cats. Louise Glück loved Henning Mankell. You might bring a page, image, track, clip from the artist (or two) whose work is especially, perhaps irrationally, beautiful to you. 

Mary-Beth Hughes is a novelist and story writer. Her most recent work is The Ocean House. On artistic affinities and friendships, a short list: Changes: Notes on Choreography by Merce Cunningham and My Body, the Buddhist by Deborah Hay. Also, Rachel Cohen’s wonderful A Chance Meeting.

• Samantha Hunt: The Atlas of Everything

Many narratives function like sportscars or a hunter’s heart-seeking arrow. They move swiftly, without meandering, to their target: the end. Ursula K. LeGuin wrote, “I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks, spears, and swords…but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. A novel is a medicine bundle. That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.” In this generative weekend workshop, we will consider mapmaking and atlas building as a model for creating container narratives. An atlas holds thousands of routes that interlace and cross, some of them, are even non-heroic. When we write in a cartographic model, there is even the possibility that we might get lost (from los, a disbanding of our armies.) We will focus on one thing. We will question borders, boundaries, and the plurality of personhood. Fernando Pessoa wrote, “I know myself only as a symphony.” We will look at gorgeous maps, stories, and essays as we begin writing our own atlases, considering macro and miniature worlds; the simultaneity of history, memory, the present, and the future. We will get lost and know time’s relative speeds, walking the world as psychogeographists, reawakened to wonder.

Samantha Hunt’s books include the novels The Seas, The Invention of Everything Else, and Mr. Splitfoot; the story collection The Dark Dark, and a collection of essays, The Unwritten Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages.

• Robert Sullivan: Reading and Writing Landscapes

In this workshop we’ll use maps and drawings to consider how we picture ourselves in places and how places help us see where we are. The session will be a chance to unpack our awareness of where we are and maybe momentarily re-wire how we perceive places. We’ll read poems, prose fragments, and almanacs that touch New York Harbor (Nancy Holt, Joseph Mitchell, and Diane Burns) and the Hudson River Valley (Washington Irving, Robert Boyle), and we’ll make a short survey of Tivoli—no survey preparation required, no previous survey experience necessary—in order to jump start our own re-surveys of the places we see everyday. For the last session, we’ll discuss a novella about summer. We’ll generate a few things in class but it won’t be so much about critiquing as experimenting and, if we’re lucky, having some fun.

Robert Sullivan is the author of eight books, including The Meadowlands, Rats, and My American Revolution, and, most recently, Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer. He is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2025 recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a contributing editor at A Public Space. He lives in Philadelphia.

• Peter Trachtenberg: On Difficulty and Attention: 

“The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.”—Simone Weil

All good writing arises from concentrated attention. For most of us, in thrall to the nonstop peep show of the Internet, such attention is extremely difficult. This workshop seeks to restore your capacity for that difficulty through generative writing prompts, readings from texts by Simone Weil, Sallie Tisdale, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and critical engagement with your own writing, with a focus on what you may have missed seeing in earlier drafts. We’ll be looking both inward, at the sources of your story, and outward, at the physical and social world that writing seeks to reflect and illuminate—and maybe even transform.

In this workshop, participants’ manuscripts (15-20 pages in Word, double spaced and paginated) will be critiqued. There will be opportunities for generative exercises as well. 

Peter Trachtenberg’s books include 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities, Another Insane Devotion, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York. He is an associate professor emeritus in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, and a Bellagio residency.
 

APPLICATION

Please submit the following:
               —A work sample of five (5) to ten (10) pages
               —A cover letter (not more than two (2) pages) that includes a bio, brief artist's statement, and your writing goals for the retreat.

             Note that we only accept PDF or Word files (.doc and .docx). Incomplete applications will not be considered.

Questions? Write office@apublicspace.org