​​​​​​​The Weight Journal publishes talented writers at the beginning of their careers, and we recognize that in the future some might look back on their early writing with embarrassment, disdain, or other forms of angst. We (the editors) get it. We’ve been there. We live there now. We all have works we wish we could take back, rewrite, or scrub from an online or print publication. But we can’t. That’s the nature of all writing: once it is out of our hands, we lose control over it and must trust our audiences with it in theirs.
 
All that to say, as stated in our submission policies, publishing with The Weight Journal means you are granting “first English-language electronic rights,” and as is standard practice across the industry, we will not remove accepted and published pieces from our archive except in the case of extreme circumstances as judged by the editors. Feel free to reach out if you feel your situation rises to that level of need. 
 
If you are not growing as a writer, you’re not much of a writer. Change should be happening. So be kind to your younger writer self. When you’re famous, you can point back to these early works as examples of how far you've come while being interviewed about the literary prize you’ve just won .