Category: Poetry

Poetry

Taking Submissions: The Lost Poetry Club: The Four Humours

Deadline: March 31st, 2024
Payment: £0.015 per word.
Theme: Speculative fiction that deals with The Four Humours (Details on that below.)

A brand new audible zine centering the bizarre, the horrifying, and the what-ifs. New Episodes bi-monthly with an exciting new theme every time. Imagine attending an open mic story-telling night in the cellar of that haunted house on the hill or the canteen of a starship that traverses time and dark dimensions. What stories would you hear? Would they inspire awe or disgust? Hope in the future or existential dread?

Genres: Sci-fi, Slipstream, Weird Fiction, Near-Future, Retellings, Folk-Tales, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, Speculative…

Formats: Mainly Short Stories, Poetry, Flash Fiction, Short Plays/Extracts, (but open to) Personal Stories, Dreams/Nightmares, Songs, Soundscapes, Fictional or Real Mini-Docs, Interviews, and whatever else you can dream up…

THEME 1.02: The Four Humours

When our nature is out of balance; tempers, like fevers, run high. Step into the bewitching world of the Four Humours, where ancient alchemy meets the intricate tapestry of the human psyche. Dividing our episode into four sections: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic.


Does your tale weave characters with raw intensity and larger-than-life personalities?  Are they charismatic, ambitious, deep thinkers, or cool-headed under pressure?  Or,  instead, impulsive, domineering, pessimistic,  or lazy?

Think tales of disease, of body or mind, potions and magic, chaos and order, material change, and personal transformation. Treat us to characters whose flaws are their undoing, whose struggles mirror our own, and whose stories resonate with the raw intensity of big emotions and larger-than-life personalities.

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Taking Submissions: Sundog Literature 2024 Window #1

Deadline: March 1st – May 1st, 2024
Payment: $50
Theme: Writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in.

A Note on Our Aesthetic

We believe there is beauty in scars on smooth skin, in the small fissures where things begin to break apart. Sundogs are not the sun itself but phantom stars appearing on the horizon, illusions produced by the play of the sun’s heat with crystals of ice. They shed their light all the same. Many are tinged with color.

We look for this same quality in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We want writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. We seek a diversity of voices speaking from visceral, lived experience. We like truth we can stare at until our eyes water, words so carefully chosen we want to reread them as soon as we have finished.

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Taking Submissions: Solar Punk Magazine April 2024 Window

Submission Window: April 1-14th, 2024
Payment: $.08 per word for fiction ($100 minimum), $40 per poem. $75 for for nonfiction, $100 for reprint cover art, $200 for original unpublished cover art, $50 for reprint interior art, $100 for original unpublished interior art
Theme: All forms of Solarpunk, however, this issue is open to BIPOC authors only

Solarpunk Magazine publishes hopeful short stories and poetry that strive for a utopian ideal, that are set in futures where communities are optimistically struggling to solve or adapt to climate change, to create or maintain a world in which humanity, technology, and nature coexist in harmony rather than in conflict. We also publish solarpunk art as well as nonfiction that explores real world, contemporary topics and their intersection with the solarpunk movement for a better future.
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Taking Submissions: SpeKulative Stories Anthology Series

Deadline: November 30th, 2024
Payment: 10 cents per word for fiction and $2/line for poetry. Also, a contributor’s copy
Theme: Speculative short stories and poems that either include trains or aliens as their focal point

The purpose of the SpeKulative Stories Anthology Series is to showcase provocative and powerful tales related to a single theme. Following the publication of our first theme anthology, Automobilia, in 2024, we are now seeking short stories and poems for the next two anthologies in the series. The titles are Train Tales and Aliens Among Us. Publication is set for early 2025.

As each title suggests, a train or an alien (space aliens that is) should be such an integral part of your story or poem that if removed the story or poem collapses.

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Taking Submissions: Cunning Vision: Sound and Vision

Deadline: March 20th, 2024
Payment: Does not say in this call, previous payments were: £100 per article, interview or short story and £50 for poetry and rituals
Theme: Sound and Vision
Note: Not open to fiction submissions from North America at this time

We are open to print magazine submissions.

Our next theme is Sound and Vision.

Artists have long spoken of the mysterious nature of creation – where do their great works come from? Tell us about found stories, the automatic process, of pictures and songs invoked in séances, of musicians and poets who found magic by unorthodox means, and occult-derived art. Some songs and paintings are like spells, speaking to our unconscious and activating something within us, from war cries to the songs with revolutionary spirit to the secret chords that please gods and the folk songs that invoke lives lead outside the mainstream. Tell us about subliminal messages in advertising and how the aesthetic and auricular world influence us. A pioneering artwork might predict the future, or change the course of history. It might show us a piece of the world and mind we never knew before. Sight is a privileged sense – what is it to see clearly, or to not see at all? Visual aids such as spectacles changed our ways of seeing – so too did the emergence of various -mancies and scrying mirrors that offered an alternative perspective; there is seeing with our eyes and then there is seeing with our other senses. For this issue, we draw inspiration from Hilma af Klint, David Bowie, William Burroughs, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington, WB Yeats, William Blake and a whole host of other artists, musicians and writers who had visions. We are looking for interviews with musicians and artists, personal essays, articles, rituals, poetry and short fiction that speak to sound and/or vision. Submit fiction or poetry and pitch non-fiction by 20th March 2024.

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Taking Submissions: Worlds of Possibility Spring 2024 Window

Deadline: March 23rd, 2024
Payment: 10 cents per word
Theme: Speculative poetry and fiction that is uplifting, happy, and/or hopeful.

Worlds of Possibility is a project I’ve been working on since the beginning of 2021. My patrons and subscribers’ pledges help sponsor original creative Science Fiction and Fantasy works, which I release early in ebook format to subscribers and then a bit later to the general public online and in audio on the OMG Julia Podcast. Worlds of Possibility celebrates human creativity and is not interested in AI assisted work.

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Taking Submissions: Haven Speculative 2024 Limited Submissions Call #2 (Early)

Submission Window: March 1st – 31st, 2024
Payment: 8 cent per word for fiction, $20 for poetry, 8 cent per word for non-fiction, $125 for cover art
Theme: Speculative fiction
Note: This call is for authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups

It’s our goal to publish diverse voices from around the world, and to do that, we are actively seeking stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces by authors from backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy canon. Our submission cycle is therefore split into two categories, where every other month is explicitly reserved for submissions by authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups. The interposing six months remain open to everyone.

Guidelines for Fiction

We are seeking stories in the English language up to 6,000 words by writers from around the world. We favor submisions that have not been published before (including on your own website), though we have historically accepted a limited number of reprints not currently appearing anywhere online. For our two issues focused on the climate crisis, we’re particularly interested in publishing stories from people displaced by or threatened by the climate emergency (see our themes below). For our other four issues, we’re open to a wide variety of stories across the SFF and weird spectra.

We pay 8¢ per word for fiction, and we try to respond to all submissions within ten weeks. We have also accepted a limited number of previously published stories, so please indicate on the form if your submission is a reprint. All submissions must use the Shunn manuscript format (we prefer Courier New) and be either .rtf, .doc, or .docx.

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Taking Submissions: Midwest Futures: Poems from Tomorrow’s Heartland

Deadline: July 1st, 2024
Payment: Contributor’s Copy
Theme: Speculative poems and micro-prose (300 words max.) engaging with themes of environmentalism, climate change, technology, and more through a lens of Midwestern experience.

Middle West Press LLC, an independent micro-publisher based in Central Iowa, has issued a call for human-generated poems and micro-prose (300 words max.) engaging with themes of environmentalism, climate change, technology, and more through a lens of Midwestern experience.
The working title of this project is Midwest Futures: Poems from Tomorrow’s Heartland.
Deadline for submissions is Jul. 1, 2024. Publication is projected for Spring/Summer 2025.
Submit via Submittable here at this link.
This is explicitly a speculative poetry (and related micro-flash-prose) market. We are interested not only in the gritty and grounded, but also near-future science-fiction-infused visions of the possible. For inspirations and vibes, see also movements such “Solarpunk,” “Eco-modernism” and “Climate Fiction” (“Cli-Fi”), as well as these potential exemplars of eco-poetry and other writing:

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