qarrtsiluni

Contributors explore a common theme or question under the direction of a single editor or editorial team, which changes every two months. We post a call for submissions at the beginning of the theme period, and deadlines are typically at the end of the first month. If you’d like to receive bi-monthly notifications via email, contact us and we’ll add you to the list.

Forms and genres accepted

We solicit contributions of non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. These may also be in audio form (and we encourage authors whose work we’ve accepted to try making an audio recording, too). Photographs, digitized artwork, and short films 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

In general, submissions of writing and video should not have been previously blogged or published elsewhere, though we do make exceptions for pieces that appeared in the author’s own blog, if the appearance was temporary or of an earlier draft. 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 should be sent via the Contact form, or as an e-mail attachment in RTF or TXT format — no Microsoft Word, please. Images should be compressed JPGs (preferred) or TIFs. 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, M4A, MP4, MPG, MOV, WAV, or WMV) but must be less than 70MB and optimized to play at a width of 400-450 pixels. Send all these types of submissions as attachments to an email, addressed to qarrtsiluni (at) gmail (dot) com. If the 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 (1-3 sentences long), with links to whichever blog or other sites you’d like us to highlight. 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.

Other notes

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

Please note that most of our theme editors to date have adopted 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.

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.