Whistling Shade Press - Submissions
The Geste seriesWhistling Shade's Geste series, including books such as Julian Bernick's Castle Bash, aims to keep alive this once dominant genre of poetry.A geste is a verse tale of romance or adventure. The geste is different from the epic in that it does not involve a large cast of characters, super-human exploits, or national identity. It is somewhat closer to a ballad, but is longer and contains more detail. Examples of gestes include Byron's "Don Juan", Keat's "Isabella", Longfellow's "Evangeline", and George Eliot's "The Spanish Gypsy". Gestes often employ a rhyme scheme, and almost always meter. In other words, a geste is not a long prose poem, and it is not simply prose broken up in free verse-style lines. Above all, a geste must have a cohesive narrative - we are not talking about collections of short narrative poems here, even if they do all vaguely surround your recent break-up. Very few gestes have been published since 1900, and not a single poetry publisher that we can find is working with this genre. Presumably the novel has overshadowed the geste. Yet we find certain stories - concentrated in action, lyrical in treatment - are better adapted for a geste than for a novel. Certainly the geste is a hard genre to master - requiring both the fiction writer's story telling abilities and a poet's beautiful language. Nonetheless we at Whistling Shade believe in the revival of the geste as a thoroughly modern genre, and are excited to launch its comeback, if any poets can be found capable of writing one. If you have written a geste, we highly encourage you to mail your MS to the address below. Unlike other book submissions, we do not require that your work has appeared in the Whistling Shade literary journal previously. And remember...
I say - the future is a serious matter -
What we can do for your bookIf we do publish your book we will:
How to submit a manuscriptFor the Geste series, you can e-mail your manuscript as a Word or RTF attachment to our editor e-mail mentioned above.If we have requested a printed manuscript, our address is:
Whistling Shade
You need not send a synopsis. Send the entire manuscript.
Other questionsAre you a vanity publisher?No. We are a royalty-paying small press.
Do you charge reading fees for manuscripts?
I write only novels, so I have nothing to submit to the journal.
Would you still consider my novel?
What genre are you looking for in fiction?
What about poetry?
What word length are you looking for?
Other questions Home |
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