Thirteen Bridges Review is an online and print journal produced by the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University at Montgomery. They seek to publish excellent fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from around the world. They publish both emerging and established authors, and they’re looking for writing that is, “original and groundbreaking.” You can get a sense of what they publish by reading past issues of the journal online.

As mentioned above, Thirteen Bridges was formerly called THAT Literary Review, which was founded as an annual print journal in 2016. They published five issues before becoming Thirteen Bridges in 2022. Thirteen Bridges publishes one story, one poem, and one creative nonfiction piece online each month. They are also planning to publish their first print issue (as Thirteen Bridges) this spring.

Right now, Thirteen Bridges is open to submissions through December 2. (Please note that although Thirteen Bridges is accepting creative nonfiction submissions right now, it does not appear that they have published any creative nonfiction yet this year, and at the time of writing this review Duotrope lists creative nonfiction submissions as closed.)

Authors of fiction and creative nonfiction may submit one piece, up to 2,000 words for the online journal, and up to 4,000 words for the print journal. They also accept short forms like flash and micro in both fiction and creative nonfiction. Authors may submit up to three short-form pieces. They are looking for fiction and creative nonfiction that is “beautifully written” and “character-driven” in all forms and styles.

Poets may submit up to three poems, totaling five pages or fewer for the online journal, and ten pages or fewer for the print journal.  They accept all forms and styles of poetry.

Submitting authors can expect a response within three months. Submissions accepted for online publication will also be considered for the print journal. Authors published in the print journal will receive one contributor copy. Authors published in the online journal will be archived on the website.

Thirteen Bridges accepts submissions online using Submittable, not via email or by post. They accept simultaneous submissions but ask that authors withdraw writing published elsewhere. They do not accept previously published work.

Thirteen Bridges only accepts submissions that follow the guidelines they’ve posted online. Please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

If you would like to learn more or submit to Thirteen Bridges, please visit their website here. 

All this to say, my disabilities are profound and I have still spent the last decade making my living as a writer. This was made possible by a lot of effort on my part, specialized training designed for dominant arm amputees, supportive parents, and thankfully, technology.

Computers have changed my life for the better. They make the act of writing much easier, and they also gave me access to tools like spell check. I will forever be grateful for them.

This isn’t to say I haven’t still received criticism as a disabled writer. I have written about this experiences, and the broader issues of gatekeeping and writing here. Whenever we share that article on Facebook I receive an outpouring of support, and a very large number of comments pushing back against the point of the article. Many people have commented to express their longing for more gatekeeping in terms of spelling and grammar, rather than less.

But generally speaking, in the ten years I’ve been publishing my work online, writers have become more accepting and understanding, that is till recently.

In mid-August, a Facebook writer friend with a large following shared an image meme supporting writers with disabilities directly impacting their writing, and the comments they received were less supportive. There was still some support in the comments, thankfully, but a lot of writers responding were only critical, and one person wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here) “You have to be grammatically correct now, disability or not. Otherwise I assume you’re actually a bot.”

This statement struck me as absurd and funny. I’ve had a lot of negative encounters with AI writing, but the issue is not the grammar or the spelling, which is generally perfect, but the content.

Most of the other individuals who responded in a negative way kept AI out of it, but it felt like sentiment was turning against disabled writers.

Now, I very much understand why generative AI is considered an issue by many writers. Currently Generative AI is trained on existing work by human authors, the vast majority of whom have not given their permission for their work to be used in this way. Writers are also worried about losing work because of AI. Also, the current quality of generative AI is not good, and generative AI is well known to simply make up facts as needed, when generating text.

As someone who has relied on spell check and other software that helps writers with disabilities for a long time now, the difference between generative AI and spell check is not even a question mark.

In early September NaNoWriMo declared that it was “Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI.” They appear to have released this statement without consulting the disabled community at all. In fact Wired interviewed a number of people about the issue who were opposed to that change, including disabled writers, and published a very thoughtful article about it here. I highly encourage everyone to read that article.

This isn’t to say that all members of the disability community are in agreement about AI. There are some individuals that argue in favour of it, it’s just they are very much in the minority based on the conversations I have had. More importantly, it seems like NaNoWriMo made this policy change regarding AI, due in part to pressure from sponsors (which include the company ProWritingAid, which is now incorporating generative AI, more on this in a minute). So they were co-opting social justice language to use it to justify their actions, which seem to actually be made for financial reasons.

After facing massive criticism, NaNoWriMo has rephrased the statement many times, but not yet, as far as I can tell, retracted it.

For me though, what was truly alarming was the number of authors, well-known and otherwise, who took the announcement from NaNoWriMo as a permission slip to say things that actively opposed disabled writers.

Many authors said something along the lines of, “NaNoWriMo’s statement that being opposed to AI is ‘classist and ableist’ is the logical next step that people make, that are already asking for less gatekeeping around spelling and grammar. We need to defend our standards around spelling and grammar now more than ever.”

That’s a paraphrase, rather than a direct quote, because I heard so many authors say a variation on the same thing, but I’m in no way exaggerating what they said.

As established earlier, this is not what most disabled writers, and the disability community at large is asking for, yet because NaNoWriMo misused social justice language, authors that are ableist are using it as a justification for their behaviour, and as a way to dismiss disabled writers as a whole. This is a huge problem, and I can see it becoming even more of an issue over the next five years.

Now, back to the issue with ProWritingAid. When it initially launched, the suggestions it made for writers were minor and not based in generative AI. I used their tools for a few years, and found some of what they offered helpful. Until this year. While the generative AI aspects of ProWritingAid are still something one could opt out of they are being encouraged more, and more aggressively, and I have found myself no longer comfortable using the software. A lot of the new suggestions from generative AI are horrible and weaken rather than strengthen my writing,

Using ProWritingAid could also theoretically cause problems for me, as more and more publications (including Authors Publish), have banned submissions of AI writing, without clearly defining the perimeters of that ban.

So now I hope I have made it clear that there are two major issues impacting disabled writers in terms of AI.

The first is that the existence of generative AI is encouraging a lot of writers to be more overtly ableist and they are using it to justify even more gate-keeping.

The second is that the influx of generative AI is impacting disabled writers by making some of the tools that were formally helpful, less useful.

Both of these things sadden me, as generative AI is clearly here to stay. Hopefully over time writers’ relationships with it will become clearer and more thoughtful, and writers without disabilities will start to think more critically about their own snap judgments.

Once you become aware of tropes, and how they’re used (and misused), they can become a useful tool in your writer’s toolkit.

Some writers will say they don’t work with tropes, but that is in fact impossible. Everyone works with tropes to a certain degree, some authors are just unaware of the tropes they are using.

This article is a good starting place in terms of increasing one’s trope awareness, but it is just a starting place.

Tropes: in characters and stories

Characters can be reduced to tropes, such as “the Park Avenue Princess” or “the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Genre publishers, especially romance publishers, sometimes list the kind of tropes they want to see. Some specifically focus on publishing work that aligns with specific tropes.

However, it is the detailed life of that character that the author constructs that makes them interesting, not the trope in and of itself.

Stories can be made up of tropes like “rags to riches” or “save the world.” Most stories involve more than one trope, that’s how authors create a more complex plot.

It’s also helpful to look at lists of tropes. TV Tropes is a particularly good place to start.

Using tropes in unexpected ways

If you are aware of tropes, it’s much easier to use them in unexpected ways – to subvert them and combine them in an exciting or surprising way.

Subverting tropes is a powerful tool available to authors. For example, you can set up a story so that it seems like a “rags to riches” arc, only to discover that it’s a “rags to rags” arc, or even more exciting, something completely unexpected, like “rags to mystery.”

Pairing a plot trope with an unexpected character trope is one of my favorite ways to generate ideas. For example, criminal mastermind plus suburban soccer mom is a pretty exciting, yet less traditional pairing (it’s also more or less the plot of TV show Good Girls).

Understanding problematic tropes

Tropes cannot be inherently good. The “Save the world” does not automatically help a writer create a story that models positive behavior, it takes an author to do that. But some tropes can be inherently problematic. For example, there’s a common science fiction/fantasy trope that women need to be sexually assaulted in order to become more powerful.

One of the many reasons authors should be more aware of tropes is so that they can avoid including problematic ones.

Identifying tropes to analyze works, create plots

Once I started identifying problematic tropes that I wanted to avoid reading, I started to also notice and identify tropes in creative work in general. I’ve found this practice surprisingly helpful because it helps me understand a story at its most basic layer, and then examine what the author has done to set that trope apart.

It’s helped me analyze and learn from stories at a different level but it’s also helped me create more unique and surprising plots, in part because I view my own plots in the context of creative work produced by others, but containing those same tropes.

In conclusion

Learning more about tropes takes time. A good place to start is to find out what tropes contribute to your favorite creative works.

But the more I think about a creative work in terms of tropes the better I understand it, and the more I understand how to make my own work better and more layered.