We publish poetry, fiction, memoirs, essays, reviews and cartoons.
Our emphasis is primarily mainstream and literary, but we have a broad
readership and do not espouse any given school of writing.
Poetry can be of any form, including lyric verse that employs rhyme and meter,
and there is no word limit. Short stories can be anywhere from very short to 10,000 words.
Essays should surround writers or
literary works. Profiles of contemporary writers are very much welcome!
We also do a few book reviews with each issue (we prefer poetry and fiction, but occasionally
we review non-fiction as well). Most of the books we choose to review are by past contributors
to Whistling Shade. If you are a publisher or author and would like us to review
your work, please query us at our admin at whistlingshade.com address.
Whistling Shade abides by a a code of literary ethics, as described below.
All submissions should be by e-mail and should contain:
- A name and mailing address. The address is important because if we accept your
work we will mail your copies to this address. E-mail submissions without a
mailing address may be sent back.
- A cover letter or brief bio about you. Where have you been published before?
(This will only minimally influence our decision, but we do like to know.) A mention
of where you heard of Whistling Shade would also be appreciated as it lets us know
how writers are getting the good word on us. What cafe did you pick us up in? What
web site did you surf to get here?
- A rational subject line. We recommend including
"submission" in the subject. If you just use "Re:" or the title of your work,
our spam filter might be fooled and the submission will cruelly be dumped into
the doomed sea of cyber flotsam.
- The work, obviously. A word count is helpful, if it isn't too much trouble.
So is page numbering. We do not have ridiculously strict format guidelines that require
certain fonts, margins etc. We live in the 21st century.
No reprints please.
Simultaneous submissions are okay, just let us know when they are accepted elsewhere by emailing the
poetry, fiction, or editor address (the same address you used to submit the original piece). It is
very important that you inform us if submitted work has been accepted by another journal.
Not only does it save our editors time in reviewing a work already taken,
there is sometimes not enough time to redo our layout or plans for a theme issue.
So if we inform you that your piece has been accepted, and you tell us that sorry, it was
already accepted elsewhere and you were just too lazy or disorganized to inform us, we may
go ahead and publish it anyway. And that can wind up being rather ... er, awkward, for you.
Also, please take it easy on our submissions staff and don't submit more than 5 poems or 1 story at
a time (up to 3 stories for flash fiction under 1000 words). Please do not submit again until you hear back from us.
Fiction submissions should be e-mailed to fiction at whistlingshade.com (substitute the "@" symbol for "at").
Poetry submissions should be e-mailed to poetry at whistlingshade.com.
Essay and all other submissions should be e-mailed to editor at whistlingshade.com
We can handle most formats (PDF, RTF, HTML, even FrameMaker), or you could just paste the
submission in the body of the e-mail. Note that we don't have access to a Mac,
so if it is in a Mac format please use one of the above.
No mailed submissions, please.
We try to respond to submissions within 3 months. It takes this long because we
have more than one editor and we have to meet and chat about these things, and getting
a bunch of editors in one place at one time can be tricky. Feel free to query
us if we have not responded within 3 months and we will give you a status update.
When we do respond it will often be a "sorry, we didn't select your work" sort
of response. Don't feel bad though, because statistically we only accept about
1 in 20 pieces submitted. We may or may not comment on your work. If we do
take it in good faith that the feedback is meant to help you gain some perspective
on the work. Because we have many submissions and lack time for carefully
thought out responses, ours might be rather brief and cryptic ... if you would
like more detailed feedback say so in your cover letter and we'll see what
we can do.
If we do accept your work, we will inform you and give you the details
of publication. The copyright will stay with you. For a story, we might
ask you for an illustration ... if you don't have anything in mind we
will have a member of the staff or an artist create something. We'll also
try to e-mail you a PDF galley of your work prior to publication so that
you can look it over. Then when the issue is ready we will mail you copies,
or (if you are local to Mpls/St. Paul) invite you to the issue release.