Pitches wanted (searching for work) | $350 per piece

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: WORDS OF MOUTH

Deadline: 1 March 2025

Rachel Meade Smith, Creator of Words of Mouth, is looking for pitches:

Call for Pitches: Words of Mouth anthology on searching for work

ABOUT WoM

Words of Mouth, founded in 2016, is a free weekly newsletter sharing opportunities for professional and creative development across design, the arts, education, information, and the built environment. True to its name, WoM has built a loyal readership of over 60,000 thanks to word-of-mouth endorsements, becoming a cherished resource for those seeking a more human and hopeful way to look for creative work.

ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY

January 2026 will mark 10 years of the newsletter. To honor the occasion, we’re putting together a book that explores the activity of looking for work through essays, interviews, and other text-based or visual ruminations. Additionally, newsletter readers will be prompted to respond to questions inspired by select pieces, and their responses will appear threaded throughout the book. It’s our hope that this conversation between people who seek, have, and give jobs will be the first of many inspired by the anthology.

WHY ‘SEARCH WORK’

Everybody looks for work, and many of us have been doing so for most of our lives. This “search work” can be all-consuming, or it can hum in the background for years. It can be thrilling—spurring vivid fantasies and the manic drafting of cover letters in the small hours of the night. Or, draining and demoralizing—a long shout into the abyss. How we experience search work depends on so many things: where and when we live, our social networks, the free time and energy at our disposal, the technologies available to us and our literacy with them.

But search work is more than just the practical act of seeking a better title or more money—it is also a search for purpose, safety, belonging, validity, a new life and personhood. The discourse tied to this work—often relegated to LinkedIn posts—fails to reflect these high-stakes and deeply personal aims.

WHAT TO SUBMIT

Within this collection, we will treat looking for work as a topic worth talking about and turning over. To that end, we invite contributions that draw out the rich psychological, social, cultural, and political dimensions of search work.

Pieces might explore, for example:

• Humility and self-promotion

• Desperation and hope

• “Overqualification” / “underqualification”

• Bias and prejudice

• Tools like resumes, cover letters, classified ads, job boards, interview bots

• Compromise

• Ghost jobs

• Dream jobs

• Dissonances between personal and professional identities

• Care responsibilities and dependencies

• Looking for work as an immigrant, older worker, or non-traditional worker

• Looking for work as a hyper-specialist or hyper-generalist

• Looking for work after incarceration, illness, or disaster

• Looking for work during war, economic depression, or political unrest

• Looking for work after a career break or career change

• Looking for work today vs. in the past

These might take the form of:

• Personal narratives

• Interviews / oral histories

• Essays

• Object studies

• Diaries

• Visual documentation or existing artifacts (e.g., cover letters, resumes, interview prep notes, correspondence)—these can be redacted or not

You do not need any particular background or experience to submit. Chosen contributors will meet briefly with an editor to discuss their concept before composing and sharing a draft, then work on revisions collaboratively with the editor. All contributors will be compensated $350.

If you’d like to contribute on a smaller scale: We will send question prompts inspired by the in-progress works in Summer 2025. These will be open to anyone; all responses will be included in the book and respondents will be credited.

HOW TO SUBMIT

Using this form, send us your responses to the following questions:

• What topic, story, or idea do you want to explore, and how does it relate to the theme of the book?

• What format will you use? (e.g., essay, interview, photo diary, etc.)

• How long do you think it will be? (There is no minimum length! but written pieces should not exceed 2,500 words)

Please use the submission form to submit your pitch by March 1st, 2025. We’ll be in touch by April 1st. Reach out to Rachel Meade Smith at rachel@wordsofmouth with any questions.

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CONTACT INFORMATION:

Submissions: Via the webform

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