year ago in September, I queued with three dozen writers on a stage in Salem, Massachusetts, as we stepped to a microphone in rapid succession to read our 100-word micro memoirs that had been published in the online journal, Five Minutes. Salem is home to the famed Salem Witch Trials that took place in 17^th century colonial New England. The grisly history still fascinates almost 350 years later, drawing thousands to this seaside community daily during the Halloween season.

Halloween was still more than six weeks away when I was there last year, but another crowd had gathered, that time for the annual, multi-day Salem Literary Festival. Susanna Baird, Editor-in-Chief for Five Minutes, structured her sponsored reading event to move at a brisk pace to match the bite-sized rhythm of stories in her journal. I’m happy to catch up with Susanna again a year later to chat about the micro form, her journal, another upcoming Salem Lit Fest, and more. But first, let’s take a quick look at their mission and submissions guidelines.

Founded in 2020, Five Minutes invites writers to explore five minutes of a life using just 100 words. Joining Susanna on the masthead is Managing Editor Maria Picone, Founding Reader Bobbi Lerman, and Kate Meen who edits their monthly newsletter “Five Minutes More.” Five Minutes invites a rotating panel of readers to vote on submissions each month that are then sent to the masthead for final decisions. I had the honor (and fun!) of being one of nine guest readers in June 2024, scoring close to 50 submissions.

Subs are accepted on a rolling basis through Submittable, and writers can expect a response within two months (sometimes sooner). Five Minutes publishes pieces online four days weekly.

WOW: Welcome, Susanna! Thanks for joining us!

Susanna: Thanks, Ann! I learned about WOW via Five Minutes, thanks to you and a few other writers who included WOW in their bios. I’m honored to be here.

WOW:  Since we opened the column with the Salem Lit Fest, why don’t we start there? I was excited when you emailed me to join you and a panel of writers at the Fest last September to read our published pieces from Five Minutes. Can you tell us more about your involvement with the Salem Literary Festival, and specifically about your reading event called “Five Live” that is part of the larger festival? How many years have you done this? How much work goes into organizing Five Live? How would you describe the energy onsite, and what is the most rewarding aspect?

Susanna: Though I’ve lived in Salem since 2004, I didn’t learn about the festival until 2018, when Madeline Miller came as keynote to talk about Circe. I joined the planning committee soon after and have been involved in a variety of ways, from helping at Children’s Lit Fest to running “Five Live”—the event you described which became part of the festival in 2022.

This year, we’re teaming up with Molecule, another Salem-based journal dedicated to very short pieces of writing for “Micro Marvels: 30 Tiny Works of Literary Art.” It’s part of a full day of literary events, and will be held September 7 at 1:00 p.m. Each Five Minutes piece will be paired with a Molecule piece, and we expect the event to be as fast-moving and high-energy as last year’s event. The advance work primarily involves pairing pieces and preparing a script, so everyone knows where to go and when. For me, the most rewarding part is getting to see a live audience react to our writers’ amazing pieces as they are read aloud. We hope more Five Minutes fans in the area will come cheer us on!

WOW: Five Minutes was founded in 2020. What prompted you to start this journal? Did the pandemic play into it?

Susanna: Since 2016, I’ve been part of a writing group that supports each other in all the usual writing-group ways. Around the summer of 2020, in an effort to clear my brain, I occasionally started my writing sessions tackling tiny moments stuck in my head. I limited myself to 100 words and short moments so I wouldn’t spend too much of my writing time on what were meant to be brain-dumping warmups. I told my group about the practice and they started writing hundred-worders as well. I threw their pieces up on my personal site and shared them on my Facebook. Because it was the pandemic, and people were looking for engaging distractions, random Facebook friends started writing hundred-word pieces about short periods of time as well, and submitting them. To give them a proper, if very basic, home I posted them on a Squarespace blog and people just kept submitting and submitting, and now ... well, same very basic blog, filled with a lot of great writing from all over the world.

WOW: Why micro memoir? Why not micro fiction? Why exactly 100 words?

Susanna: These were just meant to be start-the-day exercises for me, so I set parameters without much thought. Describing a moment I’d recently lived seemed a good clear-the-head exercise, so I went with it. I had zero experience writing either micro fiction or micro memoir, and didn’t know the latter term existed. I’d love to say I had more high-minded goals, but nope.

WOW: Your submissions guidelines are clear, but I’d wager that you may still get subs that come in at, say, 102 words or 98. How often would you say that happens? If someone is within a few words on either side, but it’s a strong piece aside from that, do you encourage them to tweak it and resubmit? Or is it just a No, because it fell outside the word count?

Susanna: What Google Docs counts as 100, MS Word may count as 99 or 101. Pages might offer a third word count. For this reason, we don’t worry about hitting 100 until a piece is accepted. At that point, if one of the word processing programs tells us it’s 100, we go with it. Having said that, our Submittable form won’t let a piece come in over 100, so that’s never an issue. On the very rare occasion a piece comes in more than a word or two below 100, Maria and I can tell just by looking. In those rare cases, we will require the submitter to revise and hit 100 before the piece goes to our guest readers.

WOW: What do you most enjoy about your editorial role? What perspective do you bring to the table?

Susanna: I’ve worked as an editor in a variety of settings, from magazines to business websites. I love editing, which allows me to come at writing from a different angle than I do when I’m knee-deep in my own writing. In my current life, I’m not doing any editing outside Five Minutes so I’m especially grateful for it.

WOW: Five Minutes publishes online, four times weekly. I imagine the micro format lends itself well to this active publishing schedule. About how many submissions come in each month, and what is Five Minutes’ acceptance rate?

Susanna: Our monthly submissions numbers vary, but typically come in between 50 and 80 pieces per month. We accept 15 to 20 every month, so the acceptance rate can be figured from there. For a month with 80 pieces, our acceptance rate would be 25-percent.

WOW: Five Minutes accepted two of my pieces—Germie and Lash Waltz—and I loved writing both. It’s a fun challenge to capture a fully realized slice of life in just 100 words. I wanted to bring out the whimsy in my pieces, but I’m sure you see all emotions presented on the page. What makes a micro jump out as a Yes for you? Does accepted work tend to share commonality—maybe precise detail, a clear turning point, or landing an emotional note quickly, given the compact form?

Susanna: Craft absolutely matters. Well-chosen particulars can push a story about a common theme into the realm of the new. In general, I want to see a shift, which can be as simple as a writer arriving at a thought as a result of what they witness or as dramatic as a writer avoiding being hit by a taxi thanks to a stranger’s intervention. But without the shift, to me it isn’t a story. Now that I’m four years into reading micro memoirs, I especially crave anything we haven’t received before. That could be the first writer from a country to submit, or a popular topic that a writer has experienced in a unique way, or writes about in a unique way.

WOW: What do you feel the micro form is able to do that a longer piece may not do?

Susanna: So many of life’s shifts are experienced in very short moments of time. A person dies. A relationship begins. A serious situation shifts into the absurd, a happy friendship tips into discord. Writers of micro memoir must figure out exactly where the shift happens, and exactly which details are necessary to both explain it and bring it to life. Micro memoirs effect a very pointed, punchy impact that you don’t always experience when you’re moving through shifts more slowly, in longer pieces.

WOW: Pointed and punchy. Great way to summarize this form. What advice might you give writers to make every word count?

Susanna: While we love very particular details, we often get pieces that contain so many adjectives they feel padded, as if the author struggled to arrive at 100. In a short amount of space, excess adjectives can tip a piece into too much and drown what’s actually happening. My number one piece of advice would be, mind your adjectives!

WOW: Sound advice! You also rotate in a new panel of readers each month, inviting writers published in Five Minutes to join you, Maria, Bobbi, and Kate in selecting pieces. I was happy to help out this past June. What prompted the idea to keep rotating guest readers on a monthly basis? What are the advantages? Any drawbacks to this rapid—and deliberate—reader turnover?

Susanna: Our contributors are our readers. When we put out the call for a few helpers a month to get additional eyes on submissions, the response was so enthusiastic we ramped it up to a larger group. We always want more stories about more situations, from more voices and lives lived in more places. To achieve that goal, we need a diversity of opinions on what we publish. And we get it! I’m always amazed at the disagreement between readers on any given piece. Very often, what three readers love, three others dislike. Not only does this process make for a greater diversity of pieces accepted, but also the readers’ explanations of why a piece did or didn’t work for them helps Maria and I when we are making the final call. So far, drawbacks have been minimal.

WOW: I noticed on your site that Five Minutes puts out occasional calls for contests. How does the team decide contest themes and choose guest contest editors? Is there a fee to enter? How often are contests announced?

Susanna: We’ve done two contests, one in Spring 2022 and one in Fall 2023, and are ramping up for our third, which will run in October with the winner announced early in 2025 (prize $150). This year’s judge is Max Pasakorn, who writes sharp, short nonfiction and is, as I type this, working on our theme for this year. We’ll be pulling in six past guest readers to help narrow the submissions to ten for Max, and I will be reading as well as Maria, Bobbi, and Kate. The fee, which is happily waived for anyone who needs it, will be $5 per submission, two submissions max. The contest will run for the month of October, and we’ll also accept our usual free submissions during that time. We’ll launch it all with a blast to our newsletter subscribers and via social media soon!

WOW: Looking forward to seeing your theme! What sets Five Minutes apart from other journals that focus on flash or micro?

Susanna: Focus-wise, we are very tight. We want a very short moment of time. I think that’s the primary thing that sets us apart. We also make a concerted effort to promote every piece, shouting them out multiple times on Instagram, X, and Facebook. We also give every submitter personalized feedback about what worked. There are some really lovely, thoughtful people running journals, so I’m not sure those things set us apart, but rather put us in good company.

WOW: You send out a monthly newsletter called “Five Minutes More” and I must compliment you on the format! I love that you include the first sentence of every piece featured in a given month. How did you decide on your newsletter’s bite-sized format that makes it such an easy and fun read?

Susanna: Writing is hard, and sometimes lonely. There’s nothing worse than having a piece accepted, only to have the journal tweet it out once, and then ... that’s it. All done. The piece you wrote, that you took to your workshop friends, that you plumped and primed, is now just out there, semi-disappeared after maybe a day of hooray. With the newsletter, we make a little more noise around each piece, and also give writers a chance to share what else they are working on, to make them feel that when they publish in Five Minutes, they become part of a supportive community. This sounds very cheerleader-y, but I guess I just want to celebrate our writers the way I want to be celebrated.

WOW: I definitely appreciate your community-building focus in the newsletter that invites writers published in your journal to share their good news. WOW does something similar. Why do you feel community is so vital for writers? How do we grow from sharing and supporting each other?

Susanna: I touched on this a little above, but writing can be a mind-melting endeavor, one that we undertake alone. The discouragement can overwhelm, whether it’s a mood dip because a piece keeps getting rejected or frustration because we are stuck on a plot problem or exactly how to phrase something to get our intent across. At the same time, many of us spend our days with friends and family who are not writers, who might be supportive but don’t understand what writing involves mentally, emotionally, intellectually. As do all professionals, writers need peers who get it. Some days, “getting it” means celebrating all that a piece’s publication represents, and some days getting it means taking a look at a passage another writer can’t make work. At its best, community is the fulfillment experienced when we are part of a group of people who are as wholly engaged with the practice of writing as we are.

WOW: We love to promote writers. In that spirit, what are some of your favorite Five Minutes pieces that our readers might enjoy?

Susanna: Like a proud parent, I love all our pieces equally. I’ll shout out the piece we published today (it’s August 16, as I’m typing this): Never Too Late by Kayla Lang, a self-described “small-town Malaysian displaced in London.” Our guest readers felt Kayla’s choice of details really captured her date’s surliness, and were completely surprised by the ending.

WOW: What a great little gem that covers years! I love the turn in Kayla’s piece. How about other literary magazines you admire? What do you appreciate about them?

Susanna: I love so many lit journals—and really appreciate the hours I know they’re all putting in—so I hate to pick! To stay on theme, I’ll mention a couple that go short-short, Paragraph Planet and Molecule, both topping out at 75 words, max. Check them out, micro fans!

WOW: As we wrap our interview, I’d love to hear about your own first publication, as those are always memorable. With which journal were you first published? Share a link if you have it!

Susanna: This is embarrassing and indicative of my middle-aged status, I can’t remember who published me first! I wrote a few pieces for the Duke University Health Center newsletter back in the late 1990s, then some pieces for a now-defunct website aimed at college students, and then moved into journalism proper in the early 2000s, publishing some short pieces with Boston Magazine and The Boston Globe that I can no longer find online! I haven’t published much lately, I’ve been knee-deep in a long project for several years, as well as my non-writing work (helping run a small nonprofit and sandwich-generation caregiving). But, here’s a piece from X-R-A-Y I was thinking about recently, when my husband and some friends took up pickleball.

I think many of us have met a Kitty when visiting family or friends in a hospital—a character, for sure! My thanks to Five Minutes Editor-in-Chief Susanna Baird for chatting with us. Readers, remember that submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. Test your brevity and pen a five-minute slice of your life to send in to Susanna and team.

Until next time!

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Ann Kathryn Kelly writes from New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals. https://annkkelly.com/.