Hello from Outlook Springs!
When we are open for submissions, if we hit our Submittable limit, submissions will close until the first of the next month.
Send us your weird, wobbly wordwork: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. See genres for specific submission guidelines, but here's a quick rundown:
- Please only one submission at a time.
- Please submit only once per Reading Period.
- Of course simultaneous submissions are OK. They should always be OK.
- Payment is $10 per poem, $10 per flash piece (under 1,000 words), $25 for short fiction and essays (over 1,000 words). Payment via PayPal or Venmo.
- Double-spaced, Times New Roman is good, but hey, you do you!
- Please don't hide any curses or hexes in your semi-colons (ahem, Dave)
- See our site for some examples of what we publish (www.outlooksprings.com)
- No counterfeit exclamation points or hyphens
Questions? Email outlookspringsnh@gmail.com
Thanks for submitting. Thanks for reading. Thanks for everything!
Send us stories we can’t put down. Our emphasis is literary fiction: “the Bigfoot's heart in conflict with itself,” as Faulkner famously said. But we aren’t biased against genre. To the contrary! Experimental, science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, magical realism, minimalist, maximalist, flash, etc., etc., are all welcome into our home, so long as there is an emphasis on character and/or language rather than on cleverness and conceit. Let us reiterate: character and language are important. We want sentences radioactive with the bizarre, the beautiful, the ugly—the world as only you see it. Surprise us. Break our hearts. Humor is always a plus. Humor and heartbreak together? Oh, boy. That’s a dream come true. Outlook Springs isn’t looking for merely competent stories—stories that are technically proficient but emotionally cold. Zap us with life.
In short: send us your best work. We can't wait to read it!
Your poetry: we want it. All of it. OK, slightly less than all of it. Some of it. Up to five poems. For instance: have you written a series of poems based on the classic television show Coach? Were you compelled by outside forces (poltergeists, demons, etc.) to write a series of poems based on the classic television show Coach? Are you one of the stars from the classic television show Coach? None of the above?
Submit!
Here’s what we want: poems that ooze with sonic pleasure. (Please, just remember to wipe the ooze off before submitting.) Poems that stagger from line-to-line with an animated corpse’s lingering bravado. As with our fiction, we’re interested in strangely human, humanly strange pieces, that captivate and scintillate. We want language that surprises us. Language with strong enough voltage to shock us back to life. Send us your finest work. That’s all we ask.
We love creative nonfiction in all its forms and variations. Send us your memoirs. Send us your Montaigne-esque ramblings. Send us your travel narratives, your lyrical essays, your personal essays, and everything in between. If it’s real, if it’s interesting, if it’s well-written and gives us a new and exciting way to see the world (or – even better—inside your head), then we’ll publish it. While we gravitate toward traditional narratives, that’s only because the vast majority of submissions follow those conventions. If your writing is non-linear, experimental, or so far out there that you don’t even know what is it, send it in; we’re always looking for work that is pushing the boundaries of form and genre. If you’re funny, even better. Funny is not the end-all and be-all of what we publish, but it doesn’t hurt.
Send us your best work.