Write for Cwlwm
Cwlwm is looking for talented, confident writers to develop pieces that will interest, engage and excite audiences across Wales
Cwlwm is now six months and fifty articles old. When we launched at the beginning of 2024, our stated aim was to create a quality magazine for Cymru, connecting communities across the country. Our vision is to create spaces where people can share stories and ideas, so that we can all develop a better understanding of our local communities, our nation and its place in the wider world.
In our opening editorial, Cymru itself is an anthology, we wrote:
Cwlwm will collect and curate personal essays, fragments of experience hint at the whole. We will explore and uncover lesser known places and platform lesser heard voices. We will publish analysis of current events but look beyond the demands of the news cycle, and review with a critical eye Wales’ cultural production. Here our diverse communities will meet and mix and mingle; merge, collide and intersect. We will examine our differences and what makes each part of our country unique in order to identify the ties that bind us. Our focus will always be people.
Since then more than 600 people have signed up as subscribers, and our articles have been read more than 40,000 times. We hope this means our belief that Wales needs and deserves a publication like Cwlwm is well-founded, and we are very grateful to everyone who has contributed to the magazine, as well as to our readers.
In order to keep going, we need new writers as well as new readers, and so for the next stage in our development, Cwlwm is pleased to be able to commission a series of 24 brand new longform articles to be published during the remainder of 2024.
We want talented, confident writers to develop pieces that excite them and will excite audiences across Wales. We are particularly interested in articles that engage with:
journeys between different places in Wales, or that reflect on relationships between places in Wales and places elsewhere in the world
local histories as lived through individuals and communities
analysis of current affairs through deep exploration of context
connections between people, land and landscape, ecology and environment
connections between people and the arts, literature and music
the experiences of less heard groups and/or the presentation of unusual perspectives
Although we want the essays we publish to be diverse in subject matter and style, and to reflect the individual perspectives and personalities of a range of writers, we also want this commissioning series to cohere as a collection, an anthology of creative nonfiction about contemporary Wales. Therefore we encourage use of the first person, and approaches that blend facts, research and observation with personal reflection and description that is evocative of place and feeling.
We anticipate that essays produced as part of this series will be in the range of 2000 – 3500 words. Writers will be afforded around one month to produce the work from the agreement of a commission. Writers commissioned as part of this series will be paid a fee of £200.
If you are interested in being commissioned as part of this series, please send your pitch of 150–250 words comprising a short overview of the proposed focus and a suggested structure (bullet points) to both dylan@cwlwm.org and merlin@cwlwm.org.