Tag: short story

Call for Submissions: Permafrost Magazine

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Permafrost Magazine is now accepting submissions.

Permafrost Magazine is the farthest north literary journal for writing and the arts.   Founded in 1977, Permafrost is housed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks MFA program and run by dedicated creative writing graduate students. We publish a winter print issue as well as a spring online issue, both of which feature compelling poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction by established writers and new voices alike.  In Alaska, our unique environment shapes our perspective, but Permafrost seeks original voices from all over the world.

Submit

Regular submissions for the print edition are read between September 1 and December 15. All pieces receive three independent readings from our staff of volunteer readers, all of whom are graduate students or faculty in the English Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The average turn-around for regular submissions is approximately three months.

If your submission arrives after our December 15 deadline, it will then be considered for the May online edition.  The deadline for submissions to the online edition is April 15.

You can submit by mail or online here: http://permafrostmag.submishmash.com.  Please note that we are charging a $3 fee for submitting online, which is comparable to the cost of postage and mailing materials and helps offset some of the journal’s expenses.

To submit by mail, send to:
Permafrost
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Department of English
P.O. Box 755720
Fairbanks, AK 99775-0640

ALWAYS ENCLOSE AN SASE.
Your work will not be returned or responded to without one.

Contributors will receive one copy of the issue in which their work appears. Additional copies can be purchased at the reduced price of $5.

Email submissions will not be read.

PROSE (FICTION AND NON-FICTION): Typed and double-spaced with author’s name, address, phone, and email at the top of page one, with each page after numbered with name at top. We welcome prose submissions of less than 8,000 words (more if it’s really great). Notify us if you’d like your manuscript returned. Always include an SASE.

POETRY: Typed with author’s name, address, phone, and email at the top of each page. Poetry does NOT need to be double spaced; please submit it as you would like it to appear. Poems of more than one page should have the author’s last name, along with page number, at the top of each following pages. No length maximums, as we like the idea of publishing something truly epic. Please do not submit more than five poems at once. Include an SASE.

ARTWORK: Photographs, drawings, cover art, etc. will be considered.

Don’t be discouraged if your first submission is not accepted, and please specify if your submission is simultaneous.Permafrost also sponsors literary contests for fiction and poetry.

Call for Submissions: The Round

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The Round is a journal of literary and visual arts based at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Published biannually, The Round accepts submissions in all mediums and from all sources, inside and outside the Brown community.

The Round is happy to accept submissions of both literary and visual art. In the past we have published prose, poetry, plays, and translations as well as paintings, drawings, prints, and photography.

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. Typically, for the fall issue, we read through October, and for the spring issue, through March. Issues are published at the end of each semester in December and May.

To submit, please send us a brief bio and your mailing address, if not on Brown’s campus, along with your work. Written submissions should be sent in .rtf, .doc, or .docx format. Please send visual art as high quality .jpg images and include a piece’s title, medium, and dimensions.

 

Please email all work to theroundmagazine@gmail.com .

 

September Submission Bonanza Challenge!

Jaclyn13 Comments

September is here, folks and that means it’s time to celebrate Labor Day by expending a bit of my labor on my writing career.  All this month, I will be working on my second Submission Bonanza!

In my first Submission Bonanza! I racked up a few rejections, got some things published (more info to come on some of those things as the publications come out!), and learned a whole lot.  It was incredibly successful in more than just my initial idea that I would start racking up the rejections to get my work out there.  I am reading more critically and closely.  I found lots of new magazines.  I feel part of a larger literary conversation.  I am inspired to write more.  Also, I am inspired to keep up with submitting and submit more.

Like last time, I will be working on submitting to 30 magazines in a month.  I have my pieces picked out and edited.  I have a list of magazines that I want to submit to. And I have a cover letter and bio template ready to go.

Feel free to join me in this journey.  I loved doing this in July and I am excited about all the magazines opening their doors to submissions this month.  I would highly recommend that anyone who is wanting to grow and develop as a writer think about doing this in some form.  Maybe you don’t want to do one magazine every day.  Maybe you want to do one every other day, one a week, or even just one.  Maybe you want to do three a week or three a day.  Whatever the case may be, set a reasonable goal or yourself and get going.  Your work isn’t going to read itself.  If you do decide to join, please let me know.  I would love to be able to support and encourage each other as the months go on.  Good luck!

Featured Author: Reaping the Rewards of a Submission Bonanza!

Jaclyn11 Comments

After an incredibly intense month of submitting writing to 30 literary magazines in 30 days, following my Submission Bonanza! Challenge, I am beginning to reap the rewards.

This month Flash Frontier included me in their featured authors section.  Check it out!

Also, if you want to do your own Submission Bonanza! you can check out my tips for editing and choosing pieces to submit, finding magazines, and writing your cover letter and bio.

Or check out the unexpected lessons that I learned while doing this challenge.

6 Tips for Perfect (Professional) Cover Letters for Literary Magazines

Jaclyn21 Comments

By now, if you’ve been following my Submission Bonanza! series, you should have picked the pieces you want to send to magazines and compiled a list of magazines that you want to submit to.  It’s time now to write a cover letter to send along with your submissions.  As Michael Nye, Editor of the Missouri Review says, sending a cover letter with your submission is “like wearing a suit to an interview.”  Don’t let your submissions to literary magazines show up naked!

It’s easy to feel stressed about this part of the process of submitting to literary magazines: the cover letter  (duh-duh dun….).  It’s understandable because this can be the first impression that you are giving to the editors of the magazine.  We definitely want to put our best foot forward and present ourselves as professional, competent writers.

But also, keep in mind that you are not being judged on your cover letter.  Editors want solid writing.  So make a nice, neat little cover letter and spend the majority of your time stressing about whether you should put that extra comma in your new creative nonfiction piece.

So here are some things to think about when writing a cover letter:

1.  Follow the guidelines of the literary magazine.

This seems self-explanatory, but a lot of literary magazines ask for different kinds of information in the cover letter.  Some of them want word counts or genre.  Others want a short bio about you.  Some even ask for no cover letter at all.  If you are submitting simultaneously, you’ll also need to note that.  Make sure you follow their specific guidelines.

 

2. Address the letter to a person.

This is not a “To Whom It May Concern” letter.  It’s pretty easy to find most of the staff at a literary magazine under their masthead.  Some magazines even tell you in the submission guidelines who to address it to.  Be as specific as possible.  If you’re submitting poetry, address it directly to Ms. Sally B. Poetryeditor.  If you can’t pinpoint a specific name, you can address it to the editor.

 

3. Keep it short and simple. 

Don’t forget, a lot of editors are reading hundreds or thousands of these.  This is not a query letter, so you don’t need to describe your piece to them.  You don’t need to tell them how you came up with the idea or list the twenty-seven other literary magazines you’ve been in.  For example, the Colorado Review suggests this cover letter:

Dear Editor,

Enclosed is my [fiction/nonfiction/poetry] submission “Title of Manuscript.” Thank you for considering it for publication in Colorado Review.

[*If submitting via mail] I’ve included an SASE for [response only/the return of my manuscript].

Your Name

Full Contact Info

 

 4. Keep it professional.

Naturally, you want to make sure that the grammar and punctuation are flawless and that it is in a professional format.  But also, you don’t need to be cute or catchy to get the editor’s attention.  Let your writing do that.  That’s what they are looking for.

 

5. Add a short bio (Optional).

Some magazines ask for a short bio or you may feel that it’s in your best interest to include one.  This should only be a line or two of relevant information. Don’t tell your life story, just one or two tidbits that are interesting or pertinent.  Don’t include a whole list of the hundreds of places you’ve been published.  Just pick 3-5.  Also, if you haven’t been published, don’t be ashamed to include that too.  As Nye suggests:

If you’ve never been published before? Say so. “If accepted, this would be my first published story.” All literary magazines love being the one to publish a writer for the first time, so acknowledging this possibility can only help.

 

 6. Add a note about what you read in the magazine or how you know the magazine (Also optional).

If you want to personalize it a bit for the magazine, some editors might like to know that you did actually take the time to read past issues or that you have had past correspondences with them.  But again, this step could be optional.

 

In the end, I really like this bit Nye’s advice really calmed me down:

A professional cover letter is all we ask, and even minus that, if the work is excellent, we don’t really care. We want to publish the best work we read, regardless of whether or not you’re an emerging writer or an established one.

So don’t stress too much about your cover letter.  Get it done, and make it professional, so you can get back to your craft.

 

So, the goal for this week:

Make a template of your cover letter and bio.  Have them ready and at hand when you want to submit.  I personally made a template that had all the information I could possibly want to send to and editor (word counts, genres, bio, etc) and then cut or edited from that for each literary magazine.  Once this work is out of the way, you’ll be nearly set to start submitting!

 

Need more help?

You can read Michael Nye’s article on The Art of the Literary Magazine Cover Letter.

You could also look at advice about what not to do by Michael Kardos at Writer’s Digest. 

Or take a look at this sample cover letter from The Review Review.

Cassiopeia

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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.

Call for Submissions: smoking glue gun

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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.

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces

Jaclyn15 Comments

Submission Bonanza!

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!

 

30 Litmags in 30 Days: Create Your Own Submission Bonanza!

Jaclyn72 Comments

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!

 

Call for Submissions: Places to Stand

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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!