qarrtsiluni

Contributors explore a common theme or question under the direction of a single editor or editorial team, which changes every three months or so. Reading periods tend to be a month long, but vary in their exact timing from year to year. If you’d like to get our calls for submission via email, please join the qarrtsiluni news group on Google or our Facebook group.

Forms and genres accepted

We solicit contributions of non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. Authors should be willing to read their works for the podcast (it’s very easy). Photographs, digitized artwork, short films, original musical compositions and spoken word submissions are also welcome, as are hybrid forms that combine poetry and prose or text and images, etc. We’re also interested in multi-author submissions, though in the case of submissions where component parts are identified as the work of different authors, it would be helpful to have a covering note letting the issue editors know whether they may also consider publishing the parts by themselves.

Restrictions

Qarrtsiluni does not consider video or written work that has been previously published in online or print journals, books or anthologies. We do, however, consider work that has only been posted on an author’s blog, personal website, or personal channel on a video upload site such as YouTube or Vimeo, because we think such online sharing constitutes a vital part of the creative process for a growing number of writers and filmmakers, and we want to encourage that.

For other types of submissions, we have an even more lenient standard: we consider previously published photos, artwork, and audio submissions as long as the artist has retained full reprint rights.

Contributors may submit work twice for a given theme, but we ask that they not send a second submission until their first submission has been accepted or returned. Please note that all of these guidelines are subject to modification by the theme editors, as indicated in the call for submissions. Limitations on size and/or volume of submissions are frequently specified.

How to submit

All text submissions must be sent via email to qarrtsiluni (at) gmail (dot) com as inline text, pasted into the body of the email; as an attachment in RTF, TXT, or DOC format; or as a link to a Google document. Images should be compressed JPGs (preferred) or TIFs; we’ll ask for larger files if we accept something. For spoken word or musical submissions: audio will be published in MP3 format, but we can convert from other formats — send what you have. Video may be in any of several common formats (AVI, MP4, MOV, OGG, or WMV); you can send a smaller version than we would publish to give our editors a sense of it.

If any of these files are too large for your email system to handle, please use a file sharing service such as senduit.com or yousendit.com.

Please include a short bio (1-4 sentences long), with link(s) to your personal blog or website. Also, the more links to online publications and books you can include, the better. The bio need not focus on writing-related accomplishments, can as sober or as humorous as you wish, and will have NO influence on the editors’ decision to publish or return the accompanying submission.

The sooner we receive submissions after the announcement of a new theme, the easier it will be for guest editors to consider their “fit” within the whole issue. Since we want every chance to consider your work as an issue starts to take shape, please send your submissions as early as possible. Turn-around times are often less than a week, but may be as long as twenty days. We also send a brief acknowledgment note as soon as we receive a submission, so if you don’t hear from us within two days of sending something, please try again. Things do get lost in the ether sometimes. Similarly, if you don’t get a yea or nay from the issue editors within the time specified in the acknowledgement note (it varies from issue to issue, depending on what the guest editors feel they can handle), please query.

Other notes

We regret that we are unable to pay authors, except in links for those who have blogs or websites.

Please note that some of our theme editors choose a fairly interactive style of working with contributors. Rather than simply returning a “near miss,” they may instead ask an author to consider some specific changes. Many of our authors welcome this sort of feedback and the chance to work with an experienced editor, while others do not. If you wish to receive a simple yes or no answer about your submission, please indicate this when you submit.

People sometimes ask us how we feel about simultaneous submissions. We feel that however you choose to submit your work is your own damn business, and we urge you to boycott any publications whose editors feel otherwise. Simultaneous submissions are always O.K., and you don’t have to inform us (unless of course a piece is accepted for publication elsewhere before we get back to you).

To learn more about the way we operate, see Rob Mackenzie’s summary of what it was like to guest-edit the Making Sense issue, or Marly Youmans on “16 things I learned from guest-editing ‘qarrtsiluni’ Insecta.”

Copyright

By the act of submitting work, the contributor agrees that, on acceptance, qarrtsiluni acquires one-time and non-exclusive anthology rights. That is, rights revert to the creator(s) of a work with the exception of an option to publish the work, whole or in part, in a future electronic or print anthology edition of qarrtsiluni, with acknowledgment of the creator(s). This agreement is implicit unless otherwise negotiated between and documented by the creator(s) and publisher at time of acceptance.

If you have further questions, please email us.