How’s it going? We’d like to know!
Practicing the Buddhadharma is a way to step fully into the world, beginning with your personal life. Your job, relationships, and aspirations are not separate from the spiritual path—they form its foundation. From this foundation point of fearless engagement, utter confusion, and complete sincerity, dharma practitioners of all ages make an effort to live a life of truth.
Shambhala Publications is putting out a call for personal essays up to 2,500 words. Please note the use of the word personal. We’re interested in you and what it’s been like for you to discover, embrace, reject, and/or deepen your personal path as a Buddhist, Buddhist wannabe, or Buddhist rebel. In other words, we’re not so much looking for explanations of the dharma as we are stories of how you interpret the dharma and what happens when you try to live as a practitioner. Each month we’ll focus on a different theme, and put out a new call for submissions based on that theme. Click here to see what themes we’re focusing on this month and next.
We’re making a home on our website for your writing. Our intention is to publish all of your essays online, as long as they are relevant, appropriate, and coherent. As we go along, our friends at the Shambhala Sun magazine will also be posting an occasional piece at Shambhala SunSpace. In time, we hope also to produce one or more eBooks using selected essays.
You can be as creative as you like. A traditional essay is fine, but you could also submit a poem, short story, or screenplay. You can create a short video or audio piece to accompany your submission, which we may include with your written piece on our site.
Here are the guidelines:
- Your submission can be up to 2,500 words and should be a personal essay/poem/short story about your experience as a dharma practitioner.
- Our friends at the Shambhala Sun magazine will be posting an occasional submission to the Under 35 Project on their website, and hope to find, in your work, new voices for their print edition as well.
- When you submit your work, it is with the understanding that we and the Shambhala Sun may publish it online. Here are the specifics about rights, ownership, copyright, and so on. Please read this carefully. You’ll be required to agree to this upon submission of your work.
- Your work will be reviewed by our editors in a timely fashion, and may be lightly edited (to correct spelling and grammatical errors) before posting.
We are very excited about this project. The hope is to bring new dharma voices to the emerging dialogue on spirituality, Buddhism, and the aspiration to live a life of wisdom and compassion.
