The majority of the posts in Stoicism Today are guest posts contributed by readers, subscribers, and writers interested in Stoicism, broadly speaking.  Anyone can contribute, but there are some guidelines for posts in the blog.

Saturday guest posts are typically between 1500-4000 words of content (i.e., not including title, author bio, and any notes).  Posts can sometimes be  longer, but almost never shorter.  This word count has turned out to be the optimal range for offering our readers a substantive post that develops some ideas in solid engagement with Stoic philosophy and practices.  If you submit a shorter draft, you will invariably receive suggestions on how you can expand it into a stronger piece more suitable for our readership.

Writers may pitch their ideas to the editor Harald Kavli and assistant editor, Judith Stove by emailing them at harald.l.kavli at gmail dot com and judith.stove at gmail dot com. They may also send first drafts directly to them at the same email addresses.  Frankly, most pitch ideas will get the response: “Sounds interesting! Send your draft when you have it ready.”

Drafts will be reviewed, and may be accepted as is, or suggestions for revisions, expansions, etc. may be made by the editor(s).  Some posts go through several stages of revision before getting published.  Guest posts submitted to the blog may be edited by Stoicism Today for grammar, spelling, style, readability before being published in their final form in the blog

When you send a draft, please make sure that it is “bare bones”, format-wise.  That makes it much easier to copy and paste from one format to the next for editing.  Bare bones means using minimal formatting (no weird fonts, indentations, centering, etc.), making section headings just the same font but in bold, etc.  Submit drafts as MSWord documents, not in other formats like PDF, GoogleDoc, RTF, Pages, etc. (every word processor can convert to Word format)

We publish a wide range of content in Stoicism Today.  All of it is in some significant ways connected to and informed by Stoic philosophy and practices.  You don’t need to have a high level of expertise in Stoicism to write a great post, of interest to and helpful for our readers.  But you must be engaging with something Stoicism-connected.  Remember that you are writing for other people interested in Stoicism, and who have likely read quite a few other previous posts in Stoicism Today.

Some examples of the types of guest posts our readership appreciates, and that we publish are:

  • Personal narratives of how they learned about, experimented with, succeeded or failed, and came to better understand Stoicism in practice.
  • Key ideas or practices derived from classic Stoic thinkers or texts and their applications to present-day problems and circumstances.
  • Discussions about historical or existing persons who could be viewed as Stoics, making a solid case for why that would be appropriate
  • Examinations of controversial or difficult Stoic doctrines, providing explanations and clarifications useful for our readership.
  • Comparative work examining connections between Stoic ideas, insights, and practices, and
  • Engaging reviews of contemporary literature about Stoicism.
  • Recent authors of books specifically on Stoicism discussing their work (may include short excerpts)
  • Poetry that is explicitly connected with Stoicism, typically accompanied by an author’s explanation of their own poetry

It is strongly suggested that prospective authors read some of the posts in Stoicism Today before submitting a piece, so that they have a good understanding and appreciation for the range of work we publish.

We are not interested in the following types of posts:

  • Paid or sponsored posts
  • Posts that only tangentially engage or mention Stoicism
  • Listicles (e.g., “10 fun facts about . . #6 will blow your mind!”
  • Posts that are more self-promotion than engagement with Stoicism