We are CLOSED for submissions.
Please review our submission guidelines before submitting your work.
Submission Guidelines
We currently accept submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork from writers who have experienced institutionalization/psychiatric hospitalization, inpatient rehab or eating disorder treatment, the troubled-teen industry, the foster care system, incarceration, or other modes of institution. You do not have to provide "proof" of your experiences, yet we ask that if you do not fall into these categories that you please refrain from submitting.
POETRY
For poetry, please limit your submission to up to 5 individual poems in one document.
PROSE
For fiction and nonfiction pieces, we ask that you limit your work to 20 double-spaced pages and under. This can include multiple short stories or essays, so long as they do not exceed this page count. Our team is small, so shorter work is all we can manage, though we hope to have larger capacity in the future.
HYBRID
We celebrate and encourage hybrid work that blends or crosses genres, incorporates multiple mediums (such as prose or poetry paired with art/photography), and/or challenges conventional formatting. If you feel that your work falls under multiple categories, feel free to indicate this in your submission.
ARTWORK
We accept visual art, such as drawings, paintings, digital arts, mixed-media, and photographs that center on themes of institutionalization. If submitting artwork/photography, please submit up to 10 jpeg. files or one PDF file in a single submission. We may accept all or only portions of your submission, but if a work is part of a larger portfolio that you wish to have published together, please indicate that in the body of the email/your submission form. You may also submit an artist’s statement explaining the significance of your work, which will be published with your piece if it is accepted, though you will have the opportunity to change/expand on your statement prior to publication.
Formatting
On the first page of your submission, please include:
-
Your name (or pseudonym)
-
Your email address
-
A short, third-person biography (Example: John Doe is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina. He has previously been published in [publication name]/this is his first time being published.)
This helps us keep our submissions organized. If we accept your work, we will reach out for an updated author bio for the mag.
Please use a 12-point, readable font. You are welcome to send doc., docx., or PDF files.
Please title the document with your last name/pseudonym, genre, and the title of your piece, such as:
DOE_FICTION_TITLE.
If you can't send a document/PDF file, you can also send your work in the body of your submission email. Please choose a submission method that is accessible to you.
We appreciate trigger warnings. We will not consider or publish anything obscenely violent or pornographic, or any work that is racist, queerphobic, xenophobic, or sexist in nature.
READY TO SUBMIT?
We offer two ways to send in your work:
Email your submission to
OR
GOOGLE FORMS
Fill out our Google form.
Additional info
Fees
Submissions are always free.
Simultaneous Submissions
We celebrate simultaneous submissions—we are all for submitting your work far and wide! Just let us know if it’s accepted elsewhere as soon as you can (we’ll celebrate for you, too).
For our magazine, please only submit up to once per genre per submission period.
Response Times
We aim to respond to submitters as quickly as possible, but there’s more of you than us. If you’ve submitted and haven’t heard back from us within 3 months, feel free to inquire about your work at under the subject “inquiry for (title of your piece)”.
Restrictions
There is no age limit or restrictions for submissions; we do not discriminate based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, or age. We are specifically seeking work from those who have been through institutionalization/
hospitalization themselves, though are also willing to consider work from family members or close friends, so long as it does not paint the subject in a bad light. We do NOT consider work from mental health workers/staff.
Edits
If your piece is accepted, it may undergo light grammar revisions (commas, periods, typos—the basics). If we would like to accept your work but feel that additional edits are needed regarding structure/content, we will reach out with our thoughts, and you can decide whether you would like to move forward with us. We will never exclude you from the conversation surrounding edits—we are here to champion and advocate for you.
Rights & Payment
All rights revert to author upon publication. We cannot currently offer payment to our contributors. We hope this is something we can do in the future.
Keep Submitting!
If you are not accepted to our magazine, please know that it does not necessarily reflect the quality of your work. We receive many incredible submissions for each issue, but we can only publish a limited amount of writing and artwork, so please keep creating and submit to us again in the future. We're rooting for you!
Questions?
If any of our guidelines are unclear, please reach out with questions, concerns, or ways for us to improve. We are here to help!
You can reach us anytime through email, social media, or our contact form.