Issue 09 Submission Wish List

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It’s the most wonderful time of year - our open submissions period! Of the things we’ll miss most after our final issue, this may be the biggest one; we mean it when we say that we are so honored to be trusted with your words and art, across every genre and topic.

Of course, we each have those special things that we always fall in love with. Those rare forms we covet. Those quirky little details that make us extra excited to see a piece in print. Enter: our time-honored tradition of the Submission Wish List!

Here are just a few (okay, a little more than a few) of our hopes, dreams, and wishes for what we’d like to see in our submission pile:

OLIVIA | Editor in Chief, poetry

  • Poems in two or more languages, either a full translation or bits and pieces. Would love to do a side-by-side English and another language spread!

  • Anything that mentions gold

  • Weather stories - where are the storm chasers?

  • What it means to have created something that suddenly has a life of its own

  • The bittersweet of endings (even if that means the last bite of your favorite muffin)

LIS | Managing Editor, fiction/nonfiction/poetry

  • Always here for the place where food, family, and history intersect

  • Science poems, especially about wonder and weirdness

  • Epistolary works!!!

  • Works from Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian creators

  • Works about identity told through metaphor

  • Finding community in the strangest of places

  • Optimistic weird post-apocalyptic stories

  • Trains, mail, radios, Morse code: the ways we move people and information

ALEX | Editor, fiction/poetry

  • Realistic fiction that begins in the middle of the action

  • Autobiographical cartoons

  • Neutral romances - neither going super well nor bad, bring on the love in the mundane!

  • Characters that are pushed to confront their desires and personhood

  • Poetry that addresses themes such as growth, regret, fond memories, thinking of the future (especially prose poetry)

  • Poetry that uses multiple voices (parent and child, teacher and student, etc)

  • Reunion specials with famous fictional characters

  • Conundrums with unconventional solutions

RILEY | Art Director, visual art

  • Themes like: encountering mistakes, redirection, journey, stagnation 

  • Comics that use passage of time in panels.

  •  Autobiographical illustration and/or comics

CAMERON | Editor, fiction/nonfiction

  • Stories of transformation, literal and metaphorical

  • Along that vein: werewolves, vampires, gargoyles, mythological and folkloric entities that deal with transformation and phases of being

  • Unusual scale: stories over millennia or in heartbeats, playing with time and / or distance

  • I remain snared by themes around religion, anger at injustice, and community

  • The Underworld, literal and metaphorical

  • Frankly, I would like this to be the queerest issue yet

  • And well, since this is the last issue, give us some floating out there among the stars, and biking on Saturn’s rings

ARI | Editor & Digital Media Manager, nonfiction/poetry/fiction

  • Alternate endings, whatever that means to you

  • All kinds of essays, but especially ones that look at small things and make them big

  • The calm after the storm

  • Queer utopia

  • Characters with weird jobs! Teach me about a career path I’ve never heard of

  • What it means to (re)write your own origin story

  • The creation of an important recipe

  • Cowboys? Cowboys.