The Pomegranate is currently seeking submissions from writing moms. We have a submissions page with some detail, but felt it would be good to send an update about this since the static page is easy to overlook!
What We Accept
Submissions from mothers only (unless we have specifically put out a call for writers of other identities) in the following categories:
-personal essay
-culturally reflective essay
-conceptual humor
-Day in the Life
Submissions should generally be at least 1000 words, and our sweet spot usually lies between 1200 and 1500, though we will consider longer pieces if the content demonstrates a need for additional length. Humor pieces are often shorter, around 750-800 words.
Please email your submissions to the attention of Amy Colleen and Lily Hirsch at [email protected]. Paste the draft into the body of the email; do not send an attachment or it may be accidentally filtered as spam.
What Do Those Categories Mean, Though
A personal essay is, at its most basic form, a story about your life that prompted you to deeper reflection, which you are now sharing with your readers. It is not a blow-by-blow account of How I Spent My Summer Vacation, unless you have something profound to share about a single incident on that summer vacation; nor is it a broad overview of a generalized experience. It relies on literary, cinematic details: dialogue, rich description, and thoughtful prose that invites the reader to read slowly. The Write the World Blog calls the personal essay “a genre that bridges reality and storytelling. It taps into the innate human instinct to find meaning in our experiences, and share that understanding with others.”
Some of our most-read personal essays include My Pandemic Baby is Turning Five, Motherhood in the Age of Incels, Noah Kahan and Parenting in the In-Between, An Open Letter to the Mom I Envied at CVS, and The Myth of the Easy Baby.
A culturally reflective essay is less about you (though not without your unique perspective!) and more about trends, phenomena, and random stuff you have observed at the bus stop. It can be about a topic that is hot right now on social media, or an open letter to a public figure, or a defense of a practice you have seen maligned. Some popular examples include All the Perfect Moms are Rich, Bring Back the Teen Babysitters, Bluey Is Not a Perfect Show (and that’s okay), and I was raised in conservative evangelicalism. YESTERYEAR missed the mark.
Is there crossover between the above two? You betcha. Is it extremely cringe and uncool to say “you betcha” in 2026? Indubitably.
Conceptual humor is the type of thing you would find in such publications as The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Belladonna Comedy, and Points in Case. , , and have written quite a lot in this genre, outside of The Pom! Some examples:
An Honest School Picture Order Form by Lily Hirsch
Places My First Baby Slept as a Newborn vs. Places My Third Baby Has Slept as a Newborn by Lucy Huber
As a Body-Positive Swimsuit Brand, We Refuse to Retouch Our Already Flawless Models by Lindsay Hameroff
What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting a Tax Refund by Julie Vick
Additionally, humor pieces can involve some form of satire that isn’t necessarily meant to be laugh-out-loud funny, but more of a tongue-in-cheek commentary that crosses over with a culturally relevant topic, like Summer Is Almost Over and You Blew It and Would I Make It as a Pilgrim Mother?
The best way to get a feel for our Day in the Life pieces is to read our archive of them; an ideal Day in the Life is fun and entertaining to read, with a moderate amount of commentary accompanying the action beats. You do not have to have an extraordinary life to write a delightful Day in the Life; you just need to be an engaging writer!
Okay, so what are we not looking for?
What We Do Not Publish
-Fiction
-Poetry
-Anything “written,” developed, generated by, or illustrated with AI. This is a hard and fast line. If you write to us pitching a piece and the email sounds like ChatGPT, we will automatically regard this with suspicion before we even look at your submission. Do. Not. Use. AI.
-Advertisements veiled as a personal essay or “how-to.” We will say more about advertisements in a later section.
-Pieces that have already appeared in another publication, without special arrangement
-Pieces that read more like a rant than an essay. We all have strong opinions, tightly held—but we want to read your opinions within a framework of nuance and generosity. We have in the past published some work that was more in line with “hot take” than “reported feature,” but we would like to move further away from outrage and into storytelling.
What We Will Pay You
Yes, all published work on this site is paid! At this time our pay rate for long-form essays is $25 USD, payable via Venmo or PayPal. For Day in the Life and short humor pieces, we will pay $15.
Sponsorships and Partnerships
First, let us address our paid subscribers: THANK YOU. Thank you for being here, for lasting through change and upheaval in our editorial team as well as in the pecuniary end of things (those of you who were premium subscribers in 2025 will remember that we had to reroute payments in January which caused quite a hassle!). Your support makes it possible for us to pay all our writers for their work.1 This is no small thing in the competitive and often lonely online-writing world. We are really, really grateful to be able to keep the lights on here and also pay our contributors through your generosity. Patrons of the arts are good neighbors. Thank you.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, but have read this far in an article that is not necessarily riveting entertainment, we’d like to thank you for your time by offering a discount!
If you are an advertiser who wishes to promote a product or service on our site, you can direct your inquiry to [email protected]. We are open to sponsorships, but are selective in the businesses we work with. We are also open to product reviews, provided it is a product we can sincerely endorse.2 We will not consider “suggestions” of topics or items to review that directly benefit a business without an accompanying sample of said product. (For example, we love reviewing books and are usually happy to do so—honestly, of course—if you send us the book!)
If you are a paid subscriber who would like to promote your own Substack, we are opening a new opportunity for you to do so! Simply email us at [email protected] with your name, the email you use for your paid subscription, the link to your own website, and a very brief description of what you write about. We will include a line at the end of an upcoming paid piece to say something Mad Libbish like “This essay was sponsored by Arabella Spencer, who writes Notes From Spencer Court, a blog about the secret machinations of the marriage market in the London Season.”3
Going Forward
Whew! Almost done.
As has been our custom since the beginning of this website, we plan to continue featuring long-form essays on Thursdays. On Mondays, we will offer lighter fare: book reviews, humor pieces, Day in the Life editions, discussion forums, etc. Monday pieces will be free for all subscribers; Thursday pieces will alternate between free and paid (see aforementioned paragraph about paying our writers and maintaining our domain).
Another way you can support The Pom, especially if you aren’t able to be a paid subscriber (which we totally understand; times are tight) is to follow us on social media! We recently welcomed Kylie W. to the team as social media manager, and she will be keeping our content updated on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. It is frowned upon for US to share links to our own work on Reddit but there’s no rule stopping YOU from doing so, should you wish. ;)
Thank you, again, for being here. Please leave us a comment and let us know if you have a question about The Pom, or tell us what’s working for you, what’s not working for you, and what you would like to see more of in the future!