From groves of spice,
Athwart the lotus-stream,
I bring for you,
Aglint with dew
A little lovely dream.
Sweet, shut your eyes,
The wild fire-fiies
Dance through the fairy neem;
From the poppy-bole
For you I stole
A little lovely dream.
Dear eyes, good-night,
In golden light
The stars around you gleam;
On you I press
With soft caress
A little lovely dream.
I love the idea of this mini-litmag on a postcard and the challenge of staying under 150 words. Also, they have online workshops where they will help you edit your work before you even submit. This one is definitely worth sharing.
Here are their submission guidelines:
We accept fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry, and book reviews year-round. Graphic fiction/non-fiction also welcome, but it must fit on a postcard. We publish only one (1!) piece in print form each month– we publish 1-4 pieces in our online issue.
We accept work on a rolling basis–you can expect to hear from us within a month to six weeks, if we’re on schedule, which we are about 50% of the time. We do pay for pieces published on postcards (more details on this below).
You may submit as many works as you like, but two per submission. All work must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are, of course, allowed–but please let us know if your work is placed elsewhere.
We will read all types of work. However, we especially like work that is audacious, surprising and zesty. Furthermore, we want this postcard to be shareable. As you’re submitting, remember the Refrigerator Rule. Ask yourself: “Would someone want this hanging on their fridge?” Work that’s about the depressingness of gloomy alcohol clinking on the bottom of a shadowy glass in the gloaming after a father’s death wouldn’t work as well hanging from a fridge or tucked playfully in someone’s lunchbag.
That said, if you’ve got some melancholy work that is surprising and zesty and GOOD then we would be very excited to check it out.
See our “ISSUES” page to read samples of the work we have published in the past.
We will also read your work, and give you detailed feedback, BEFORE you submit. (We must be crazy.) Bring your piece to our super friendly online workshop, held every other Wednesday.
Depending on how generous we’re feeling, we also often give feedback with our rejections, especially if it is requested.
Note: We do not solicit work — and we read all of our submissions blindly (we don’t look at cover letters until we decide to accept/reject). Every submission we receive is given the same consideration, and is read by at least two, but up to four people, and often out loud (while we consume delicious items, like raspberry tart and/or dumplings.)
To use our online submission manager, it costs $2 to submit up to two pieces of work. We also accept submissions by regular mail, for no fee. All pieces are considered for both our print (postcard) and our online issues, unless you specify otherwise.
You may submit as many pieces as you like, but you will need to pay the $2 submission fee for every two submissions (your two pieces must be in the same document, or Submittable will charge you twice!)- or, if you submit by mail, you must mail every two pieces separately, with their own return envelope (you mustinclude a SASE for a response.)
As for payment– it is sort of like we hold a mini-contest every month (but it’s not exactly a contest, as our submissions are rolling). The author we publish on a postcard receives 30% of all the submission money (after Submittable takes its 52% cut) for that month, from the 20th of the month two months prior publication, to the 20th of the month one month prior (guaranteed minimum of $10!), along with five copies of that month’s issue. For example, if we publish you in October, you get 30% of the money we received between August 20th and September 20th.
Authors published in our online issue do not receive monetary compensation at this time, but will receive five copies of the corresponding month’s postcard.
Click here to go to our online submission manager.
Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 2: Finding LitMags
One of the lessons that really hit home during my Submission Bonanza! was that I need to be more choosy about the literary magazines that I submit to. Now that I have a few acceptances under my belt, I realize that I may have sold myself short in my submission process. Before starting this challenge, I was just excited to have my work ‘out there.’ And in some ways I still am. But after my first acceptance, when I had to contact all the other magazines I had submitted to and ask them to withdraw the submission that was accepted, well… I was kind of sad to be withdrawing some of those.
Don’t get me wrong, it was great to get acceptances and I’m looking forward to seeing the publications, but next time around, I will be a little more thoughtful in choosing which literary magazines I submit to. Many magazines are looking for unpublished pieces so that they can have first time rights and once you give those away, it’s much more difficult to find places that will want to publish a piece.
Here are some general things to think about when looking for magazines:*
Do you want to get paid?
My own Submission Bonanza! challenge started as a labor of love and I wasn’t at all thinking about getting paid. But now that I have racked up some acceptances, I’m a little more keen to be compensated for my work. A lot of magazines offer contributors copies as payment. Others offer a small, token payment of $5-20 USD. Still others pay by word, line, or page. One of my favorite payment systems is automatic consideration in a contest, which means the chance of a bigger monetary prize and a contest to put on your CV, in addition to publication.
Are you willing to pay to submit to magazines?
A lot of magazines that I found asked for a small ($2-3 USD) reading fee if you submitted online. This means that you don’t have to spend the time/money to print your pieces, get envelopes, and pay for postage for your submission and your SASE for the response. This could be a reasonable trade-off, especially if you are looking to get paid, or if you are submitting to magazines abroad. If you do a month-long Submission Bonanza! at the end of the month you will have spent about $90 USD and have 30 chances to get paid and published. On the other hand, there are plenty of magazines out there that don’t charge a reading fee, even some that compensate writers, so you just need to decide what you are comfortable with.
Do you want to be in print or online?
There’s something really satisfying about seeing your work and your name in print. A lot of print magazines have years of prestige and awards behind them. But, as brightonsauce said, there are very few people reading print literary magazines these days. Perhaps you could reach a bigger audience with a small online magazine than you could with a small print magazine. There are also a lot of litmags out there that have both print and online editions. This is just something to give some thought to as you look for magazines.
What kind of rights are you willing to give up?
I am not a copyright lawyer, so I am not going to try to explain the legalities of the different kinds of publications rights. But, I will direct you to this article and this article, both of which I found useful when I started thinking about publication rights. What’s on your blog seems to be a little bit of a gray area. I found magazines that specifically said personal blogs counted as being previously published and also found magazines that said that this kind of publication was not considered by them to be previously published. Just to be safe, I took down the pieces I was submitting from my blog, but it was something I had to wrestle with a bit.
Are you submitting online or by mail?
I was fortunate enough to do my Submission Bonanza! from a tiny island in the Caribbean that did not have a post office. So, this made this particular decision quite easy for me. A lot of literary magazines that I found charged a fee for electronic submissions but not snail mail submissions. I also found quite a few that no longer accepted submissions by post. Just something to consider as you search.
Do you want to submit this piece to other magazines?
Luckily for us writers, most of the literary magazines that I looked at accepted simultaneous submissions, which means you can submit that piece to other magazines as you wait to hear back from them. If you plan on submitting your work to more than one magazine at a time (which I highly recommend!) make sure that they all accept simultaneous submissions.
There are a lot of tools out there to help writers find magazines that they can submit to. One of the most popular is Duotrope. You can currently use their free trial to give it a go, but they have recently gone to a paid subscription service. It’s $50 USD per year and helps you keep track of deadlines and submissions, so a lot of writers find it invaluable.
If you don’t have the funds to invest in Duotrope, never fear! There are lots of resources out there for writers who are looking for markets to be published in. The one I’ve personally used the most is Poets & Writers, which has a free search function where you can search by payment type, genre, or format of the magazine. (This one is also recommended by Mary MacAvoy.)
You can also take a look at The Submission Grinder, which is another one of my favorites. The platform is still in Beta mode, but their database is growing rapidly and they are quickly becoming a good, free alternative to Duotrope. This one is easily searchable using lots of different criteria, so it’s incredibly useful. One drawback is that it only looks at magazines that accept fiction, so if you’re looking to submit nonfiction or poetry, you could still use it (since a lot of literary magazines accept multiple genres) but you’ll have to do a little more research to weed out the magazines that accept your genre. (And Rachel K. Jones finds this one useful, too.)
There are also lots of lists of magazines. For example, I personally was interested in magazines that were affiliated with Writing M.F.A. Programs, so I used this list. Maybe you want to be in a Top 50 magazine, so you could use this list. Perhaps you know you want to submit electronically, so you could use this list. If you’re looking for magazines that are particularly edgy, you could look here. Maybe you just want a giant resource of lots of magazines, so you could look here or here. I personally was looking for magazines that accepted online submissions, did not charge a reading fee, accepted simultaneous submissions, and were reading in the summer months, sothis is the list I came up with.
Goal for this week:
Compile a list of magazines (I would recommend double the number you are planning to submit to) as possible candidates to submit your work to.
*More info on how to match your specific pieces to magazines will be coming in a future post. For now, keep your eye out for magazines that publish the genre of pieces you have, match your criteria from the questions above, and that you like the feel of.
She floated on her back in the water, looking up at the stars. Her arms and legs flowed in waves that kept her afloat. All around her, the phosphorescence of a summer’s night twinkled in the sea. They left stars on her knees, her breasts, her hips and her toes. A tiny star rested on the crown of her head. With the sky as her full range of vision and weightless in the water, there was no up or down, no north or south and she spun.
She reminisced about how she got here, splayed amongst the ocean of stars.
She had been tied to the sea for as long as she could remember. In her early years she sat on the beach, watching the waves hesitantly tickle the shore and run away laughing. As a teenager, she wore fire coral in her hair and the skeletons of sea urchins on her fingers so that the ocean never left her sight. Each time she waved her hand, each time she swung her head, the waves crashed around her. As queen, she nestled herself on the rocks asking starfish and octopuses for guidance. They never failed to disappoint.
You can imagine, then, how she felt when the sea turned against her. And it all started with a tiny misunderstanding.
It was nearly sunset, that honeyed hour when everything glowed with leftover sunlight. She was perched on the edge of a tide pool with her toes in the water. Anemones and hermit crabs had come out to watch the twilight settle in. She crawled to the watch the still, glassy water meet the shore below. It was a mirror, as if the whole ocean held its breath in her presence. “You are the most beautiful thing in the world,” she said to the sea.
From the peaceful crepuscular blue, the waters began to churn and boil. The waves tossed angry white caps into the air and the nereids bubbled up from the depths of their silvery cave. All fifty of them poked heads out of the water, glaring at her. They were radiant, as if the sunlight soaked up by the ocean poured from them.
“Using our home as a looking glass?” Clio asked her.
“The most beautiful thing in the world, are you?” Halie mimicked, her eyes narrowing.
She was taken aback, unable to speak in their presence.
And just as suddenly, they were gone.
It was a mere three hours later when the tsunami struck. The ocean pulled itself up to rival the mountains and came crashing down. All of Poseidon’s power slapped her kingdom, leaving it whirling, in tears.
As the waters receded, she went back to the sea, her husband in tow, looking for answers. She asked sharks and lobsters, kissing fish and dolphins, shrimp and sea turtles. They all stayed silent. Only the man-o-war responded.
“It will happen again and again,” his voice undulated.
“What can we do?”
“You must show you are sorry, humbled. You must give something precious.”
“Gold? Jewels? Anything,” her husband’s voice strained.
“More precious.”
She felt her stomach drop. She knew even before it was spoken.
The jelly fish’s tentacles crept toward her ankles.
“You are the offender,” he directed his speech towards her. “What’s most precious to you?”
At home, in their palace, the couple fought. She had a daughter to protect, and he a kingdom. Word of the man-o-war’s prophecy seeped through the city, out into the fields, and back to the sea. Citizens came to protest, to demand the safety and protection of their king.
The waters receded once more, threatening the province, exposing a vulnerable beach and stranding minnows and whale sharks on the shore. You are minnows, it taunted the citizens. Are you more powerful than whale sharks?
And what is a mother to do? How many lives is a daughter’s life worth? The king decided there was no choice to be made.
The parade of king, princess, queen, and citizens followed the retreating sea. It seemed they walked for days, through seaweed and over sand dollars. Crabs joined the procession and the people gathered starfish for luck on their pilgrimage. Seagulls and pelicans pointed the way, leading the flock. When dolphins were found stranded, women made stretchers from skirts and scarves and carried them to the sea.
All the while, all eyes were on her daughter. They adorned her to make her the best offering the sea had ever seen. They dressed her in seaweed and put fire coral in her hair. They hung sea urchins from her ears and put shells on her fingers. She was covered with the ocean, until she looked as if she were drowning in a Sargasso Sea. Her mother could only look away.
When they reached the water’s edge the found a large rock, tied her to it, and left.
Back in the kingdom, the ocean returned, placid and inviting. It gave up fish and lobster to feast on. It sparkled an ecstatic aquamarine. The offering had worked.
And because this is a fairy tale, her daughter returned, on the arm of a hero, saved from the briny wrath.
The kingdom rejoiced. The king threw feast upon feast: for the generous ocean, for the princess returned, for the dashing new hero. Even a wedding ensued.
But very little changed for her. She had still lost a daughter. When she looked in her daughter’s eyes, she did not see the bond they once shared, their tender secrets, the maternal adoration, the unconditional affection. Nor did she see hatred or blame, resentment or hostility. What she saw was much worse – pity.
Pity for a mother who would bring such a fate upon a daughter. Pity for a woman who could not protect her child from a too-pragmatic father. Pity for someone who could not speak up.
It was probably expected and predictable when she threw herself off the cliff into the sea. The ocean received her with open arms, welcoming her home the moment she hit the salty sheets. Wrapped in the waves, she laid on a rock, looking through the surf up at the stars and surrounded by phosphorescence. The sea held her suspended, her arms and legs splayed so that she was a W. The light landed on her head, her shoulders, waist, knee, and breast. She flowed there, light and water, looking to the North Pole and never right-side-up, as she waited for her daughter, the hero, and her husband to join her. All returning to the ocean of stars from whence they’d come.
Creative Commons love and a big thank you to TravelinginEurope and tristanf, respectively for the amazing photos.
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won’t come out.
Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.
She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,
she does not come out.
Don’t you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly
to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,
so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,
all will not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then
I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
The black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you.
In my search for litmags, I came across this funky little gem and really loved the feel of it. I wanted to pass it on to all of you:
SMOKING GLUE GUN IS ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS
we approach, handle & care for poems as pieces of art.
we publish work that is fresh &/or human, flashy &/or subtle.
we accept original/unpublished submissions in all forms: text, sound, video, image, hybrid, etc.
please submit 4-8 pieces (video under 10 minutes) through submishmash once during each reading period.
(accepted formats include .doc, .docx, pdf, jpeg, audio/video able to be played in itunes).
all rights revert to the author[s] &/or artist[s] upon publication, though we do ask that smoking glue gun is acknowledged as the original publisher if subsequently published. we accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know if your work is accepted elsewhere.
How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces
It feels like a big decision: when is a piece done? We all want our work to be ‘perfect.’ Naturally, we want to put our best foot forward and make sure that anything we submit is the very best it can be. But don’t forget, this challenge started with one of The Copybot’s 100 Ways to Become a Better Writer: #66 Rack up Rejections. You can’t wait until you know that a piece will be accepted to submit it. You need to submit it first to find out. Even the very act of submitting, whether they are accepted or not, will make you grow and learn and develop as a writer.
Of course, you want to send out solid, professional pieces. Make sure you are submitting work that you are proud to attach your name to. Ask yourself, if this comes out in print, would you share it with people? Would you be proud to have your name in the byline? To me, this is the most important criteria.
I personally am a big believer in the idea that if you wait for perfection, nothing you write is ever going to make it out the door. No piece is ever really finished. Your ideas about each piece of writing that you create will grow and change, just as you do. You can always look at your work from new, fresh, different perspectives. Some pieces will look good to you one year and like garbage the next. And it’s really a doozy to try to predict what will appeal to different readers or editors at different magazines. So pick pieces that you like, right now. Chances are that if you like them, others out there will too.
Your work doesn’t need to be perfect to be out in the world. Obviously, it’s important when polishing work to think about details. But there is a difference between meaningful details and minutiae. I personally spent days wondering if I should put one space or two between lines in a particular poem I was sending out. Finally, I had to admit to myself that if an editor liked it, they liked it and if they didn’t, an extra space wasn’t going to change their mind. No editor was going to pour over this poem for days the way I was. They just don’t have time for that.
So I think of it as a process of polishing. Your bits of creativity are diamonds. Maybe they start as diamonds in the rough, so of course they need to be polished. You want them to shine and shimmer and be as clear and beautiful as possible. But if you sit there polishing them for years, they will wear away until there is no diamond left. It will become just a pile of dust that you can’t sell or use or share with other people. Or worse, you’ll have a nice little diamond sitting in your desk drawer collecting dust instead of sparkling. Diamonds need to reflect light in order to shine, and so does your writing. It’s not going to shimmer in the darkness of your desk drawer/computer hard drive/recesses of your brain. It needs to be out in the sunlight. So, by all means, polish your diamonds. It’s necessary. But don’t chip away at them until there’s nothing left and don’t let them sit in darkness unable to sparkle.
To me, the easiest way to think about these decisions is to realize that in the end, it’s not my decision if something is ready to be published in a particular literary magazine. I only have to decide if I would be proud to see this piece, with my name on it, in print. If I would, I’m sending it out and the readers and editors at the various literary magazines that I’m submitting it to can decide if it’s ‘perfect’ enough to print in their publication. Do you want this piece published? If you do, then send it out.
Perhaps the most practical reason to submit something that might not be quite ‘perfect’ in your eyes is that you might get feedback on it. Last year I submitted to Flash Frontier and got a lovely letter back saying they liked the piece, but suggesting ways that I could make it more solid and clearer. (You can see the before and after pieces.) It was invaluable advice. I took the advice and it did polish that tiny diamond I had. And, they ended up publishing it. I found that many of the literary magazines I looked at offered to give writers feedback, if you asked for it and were willing to wait a little longer for a response. Some venues (like Hoot Review) even have scheduled workshops and are willing to work with you on a piece before you even submit it.
One more thing I’ve had a lot of comments about from people out there is that they don’t have enough pieces or work finished to do this challenge. Many literary magazines are happy to accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send your piece to more than one litmag at a time. You could send just your favorite piece to 30 different magazines all at the same time. So, if you have just one poem or one book review or one flash fiction piece, you have enough to do the 30 day challenge.
Organizing:
I personally chose about 15 of my strongest pieces, gave them a little polish-up and made sure they were ready to go out into the world. Once I knew which pieces I was ready to submit, I made a handy little spreadsheet so that I could keep track of what I submitted to where and when (see below). This is incredibly important because when your pieces get accepted (yes, when, not if) you may need to withdraw them from other magazines. One of the pieces of info that I knew I needed was word count because I planned to submit some flash fiction, and I listed that below the title of each piece. This spreadsheet is also how I kept track of my responses. You can see in this image that Camroc Review sent me my first rejection (in pink), so then I knew that those pieces could be sent out to even more places or maybe that they needed more polishing. At the bottom of this spreadsheet, which you can’t see, is a total of how many times I submitted each piece, just a sum of all the 1’s I input to show that something had been submitted. It’s a really good idea to make this spreadsheet now so that you don’t have to do it while you are doing the work of submitting later on. You don’t need to know the litmags just yet, we’ll take care of those next week.
So, this is the goal for this week: collect one, a few, twenty pieces of writing that you like. Polish them (gently!) until you would be proud to see them published. Get yourself organized so that you keep track of your little diamonds, whether you are using Duotrope, a notebook, a dry erase scoreboard, or a little spreadsheet like mine. And get ready to rack up rejections – and probably some acceptances too!
P.S. Thank you to everyone for the comments and suggestions. Definitely keep the questions coming and feel free to suggest issues that you want to see addressed. I’ll do my best to respond to all of these. Keep in mind also that I’m learning as I go too, so your knowledge and experience is appreciated as well!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmWZOsVtqR0&w=420&h=315]
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
From Charles Bukowski’s book “The Last Night of Earth Poems”
(c) Charles Bukowski
I did it! I completed my self-imposed challenge, Submission Bonanza! During the month of July, I submitted poetry, creative nonfiction, short stories, and flash fiction to 30 litmags. I’m not going to lie, it took work and it took time. After so many years not submitting any work and not focusing on my writing, this was definitely a challenge for me. But I can certainly say it was well worth it. I would highly recommend that anyone looking to grow as a writer think about setting their own Submission Bonanza! I’ve grown and learned so many things over the past month and I am excited to share them all with you.
You can see my halfway post, Notches on the Bedpost, to see some of the benefits I’ve gained and ways I’ve been developing by doing this exercise. There are so many ways in which I have grown. I’ve become a better reader. I’ve started editing more seriously. I’ve learned so much more about contemporary writers and writing. I feel like I am getting familiar with literary magazines in way I wasn’t before. Most importantly, I’ve been motivated to write more than I ever have before.
Also (spoiler alert!) I have received a few replies already and it’s not just rejections I am racking up.
Because I felt like this exercise was so successful in my growth and motivation as a writer, I am planning on doing it again for the month of September and I would love for anyone who is interested to join me.
All this month, I will be posting a practical guide on how to create your own Submission Bonanza! Once you lay the groundwork (finding magazines, choosing your pieces, writing your cover letter) this month, you will be ready by September 1st to start submitting to the many, many litmags which will be opening their mailboxes for submissions.
After I did the prep work of looking for magazines, editing my work, and writing a template of my cover letter and bio, it took me about an hour to submit to each magazine. Decide for yourself a reasonable goal for your Submission Bonanza! I am fortunate to have an hour a day to submit to magazines and also still have time for my writing. What kind of time can you make for it? Can you do an hour a week? Three hours a week? An hour a day? Three hours a day? You want to challenge yourself, sure. But you also want to make a Submission Bonanza! that you can stick to.
I am really excited about doing this again and getting into gear for another flurry of submissions. If you’re excited too, let me know! I would love to share lessons learned, tricks and things to consider, and just general motivation and support with anyone who’s game!
Saw Palm, the University of South Florida’s literary magazine, is calling for submissions for its series Places to Stand.
I found this call for submissions while working on my Submission Bonanza!, an attempt to submit work to thirty literary magazines in the month of July.
Since a huge part of my interest in writing and words is place-based, I am in love with this project and I wanted to share it with you all and encourage you to submit too!
Even if you don’t have writing about Florida, it’s a really lovely prompt.
What Is It?
Places to Stand is a literary map of Florida, using words instead of photos. Each pushpin marks a point where a contributor has written a short nonfiction piece about what it’s like to stand at that particular place at a particular moment in time. Some of the Places to Stand pieces are memories. Some are written on the spot. Some are written as poetry. Click on the pushpins and take a literary tour through Florida time and space!
Places to Stand in Florida (appears on sawpalm.org)
Please tell us what it’s like to stand at a specific place in Florida at a specific time of day in 500 words or less. While we enjoy the unusual, locations should be public and accessible (so not your bathroom!) Please include GPS coordinates.
Unlike other categories, current or recent USF students and faculty are welcome to submit pieces for the Places to Stand series.
Poems submitted as part of the Places to Stand series are welcome but should be justified left and otherwise not have complex formatting and spacing. This is due to technical limitations in Google Earth.
You can submit here!
