Call for submissions from unagented Writers

Dear Dial Team, 

 I had always wanted to be a wife and a mother. We had five children so quickly people recommended we get cable and then we adopted our baby. The beauty and magic of our family outshined an underlying fact. My husband had been cheating on me for the last seven of our 19 years together.  While I was combing out lice,  protesting the NRA, reading aloud Harry Potter and driving the soccer carpool, he was lying bare in a hotel room with a woman named Hailey. And I had no idea. Our oldest had anorexia, our baby had multiple disabilities, and my true love wasn’t true. 

Mouth of the South is an 80,000 word memoir of finding myself utterly alone yet feeling the deep despair so many of us know too well. Writing secrets I wasn’t supposed to tell allows me freedom from old assumptions. Set in Atlanta, as the South became bitter, Obama had been replaced by overly proud white men and I found deleted emails of infidelity. The truth telling of Glennon Doyle’s Carry On, Warrior and the soul aching lyrics of Patty Griffin’s songs heartened me to write my way toward understanding the dichotomies of life as in Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. 

I have a background in education- with a focus on teaching children with significant disabilities. My teaching and my mothering has led me over and over again to the basics of life- love hard and don’t care about the rest. I have a four year old blog Momoirist that has been a practice of vulnerability. I document my life in photographs and paragraphs, with truth as the rule. 

Dial Press has published many books I have loved, from Sophie Kinsella’s tales that allow me to laugh about outlandish difficulties while forgetting my own or Glennon Doyle’s books which encourage me to quit shame. To have a published memoir in your featured titles would be magical and affirming, like the first time I heard the Chicks album Gaslighter. I am querying you because I am lucky enough to fit your submissions guidelines perfectly- an unagented writer passionately seeking publication of a memoir driven by heart. 

Kind regards, 

Martee Rodi

I sent in a query letter. My chances are as good as anybody else. Or I am an awful writer and the team at Dial will print my query letter just so they can crumple it and throw it away in their basketball hoop trash can. I love you all so much and I haven’t given up. That is enough for today. Lee, I owe you this hopeful moment because you encourage me.

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