Ten reasons why 
our journal would 
be a good choice 
in your writing courses



	1.  
We publish only creative non-fiction - no magazine articles, 
no newspaper columns,  and most importantly, 
no chapters from books or excerpts of longer works posing as essays.
And of course, we have no advertisements.  
(One of our persistent complaints as teachers has always been  
the "essay anthology," which in reality, 
only contains a handful of true, unedited essays.)




2.  
We're an annual, so each new issue of Under the Sun is genuinely new, 
with all new selections...not superficially new, with a new cover 
and a handful of additions and deletions 
(and a bigger price tag).




3.
We're of manageable size - 12 to 25 essays per issue, 150-250 pages or so.  
Your students can actually read the entire issue over 
the course of one semester - not a small fraction.




4.
All the essays we publish are brand new, written by writers still breathing.  
Should your students read essays such as 
"Shooting an Elephant" and "Once More to the Lake"?  
Of course. They're brilliant.
But use Under the Sun as your primary text.




5.
Variety.
We've got serious and funny, long and short, traditional 
and non-traditional, "simple" and "challenging."
Variety of style and subject matter, especially over-looked subject matter,
is what the essay, since Montaigne, has always been about.




6.
We're teachers of writing ourselves.  We know your problems.
We're also writers, with essays of our own that have 
appeared in such distinguished journals as
North American Review, Gettysbury Review  and Michigan Quarterly Review.




7.
We've tested Under the Sun as a text in our own classes, 
and our students overwhelmingly agree that is is much more valuable 
to them - and much more enjoyable - than a "real" text.




8.
We're affordable: $12.00 
(with no additional costs for shipping and handling).  
Maybe you and I paid that kind of price for textbooks when we were students,
but our own students, as you well know, do not.




9.
We won't pull any fast ones on you by publishing 
"special" or "thematic" issues that we think are 
cool but that you can't use as a teacher.  Our sole mission is to 
publish the best creative non-fiction that comes to us each year.  
Period.




10.
We print good stuff.
Ask the editors of Best American Essays.
Ask Grant Travey of Literary Magazine Review, who said that 
Under the Sun "...inspired [my students] to write about quiet things, 
normal everyday things...[and] not to be afraid 
to write about [themselves], and more importantly, to write 'from the gut.'"






That's 10 reasons.  
We could have given you more, but God didn't, so we won't either.



Our Offer


We'll send you a desk copy at a discount price of $7.00, postage paid.
Look it over and see what you think.


Each issue of Under the Sun (published each summer, in time for 
the following academic year) contains the highest quality essays we 
received in manuscript for that year - up to 200 submissions annually.





Why are we called Under the Sun?  
Because of the quote we're using from J.B. Morton (you've probably never 
heard of him either - we hadn't) as our permanent epigraph:


"An essay is a short piece of prose in which the author 
reveals himself in relation to any subject 
under the sun..."




Thanks for taking the time to read yet another text-pitch.




Please address all correspondence to:


Heidemarie Z. Weidner, Editor
Under the Sun
Department of English, Box 5053
Tennessee Technological University
Cookeville, TN   38505






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