The New Experience.

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the newly refreshed Grande Dame Literary & Art Journal / Moth&Thistle.

We’re so glad you’re here. While the blog has a new look and some exciting new features, the heart of what we do remains the same. You will still find the short stories, memoirs, essays, and poetry that were part of the old blog, along with new sections for flash fiction, flash nonfiction, art, and interviews.

The name Moth&Thistle?
A moth is drawn to a flame and it has a literary overtone. The thistle represents a paintbrush, and with the opening of an art ‘gallery’, it felt like it went well with the word moth.

As part of this update, we looked at more than thirty other literary blogs for inspiration and guidance. One of the most common features we found was left-aligned text, and we chose to follow that format because it feels clean, modern, consistent, and easy to read. That means that paragraphs, dialogue, and section breaks (*** is GDL’s style) should all be flush left. That said, we also want to honor intentional stylistic choices. If you include a short, stand-alone passage that is indented for emphasis, we will leave that formatting in place. We are especially happy to share that poetry now has its own formatting tool—something the old blog did not offer. This should help us preserve line breaks and spacing much more accurately, which was often a frustrating challenge on the previous site.

Links are also easier for us to work with now. If you include a URL in full or embed a hyperlink in your document, it should automatically appear as a live link on the site, which is a tremendous help to us. Handles do not read in as live links.

Sending print-ready material and not offering a proofing stage, is not because we do not care about the details—quite the opposite. We want your work, and our blog, to shine. But many literary venues follow this same standard. Spellcheck and grammar tools in Word are a good place to start, but we strongly encourage writers to go a step further by working with a human editor or proofreader, or by using a writing tool such as ProWritingAid (affiliate link). There are many excellent options available; this is simply the one we happen to prefer at GDL. (A writing assistant is technically an AI tool, but it’s one thing to use it to catch typos and errors, another to have a bot write your story.)

It is also true that work can be declined when formatting guidelines are not followed, so taking a little extra care before submitting can make a real difference (scroll further down for details about GDL formatting).

Thank you, as always, for your support, your understanding, and your submissions. We look forward to reading what you send.

With appreciation,
The Editors of Grande Dame Literary & Art Journal / Moth & Thistle

FORMATTING OVERVIEW:

For fiction and nonfiction, our formatting standard remains the same:
12-point Times New Roman, 1-inch margins (2.5 cm), and double spacing.

For poetry, single spacing within lines is perfectly fine and remains the exception.

The following are examples of what the new posts look like on the blog.

EXAMPLE OF ALL FICTION/NON-FICTION:

(EXCERPT FROM MEMOIR BY LEE ANN SUMMERS ‘THE REUNION’)

EXAMPLE OF POETRY:

(POEM BY AMANDA ROCHA ‘MOON PHASES’)