PFN – Redivider Journal Seeking Submissions with the Theme: “Blurred Genre”

Submission Guidelines

BLURRED GENRE: SUMMER ’23 SPECIAL EDITION

Redivider’s Summer ’23 Blurred Genre special edition explores the fluid boundaries between genres. We welcome all hybrid, genre-blurring and experimental work. Submit your flash nonfiction, visual sci-fi poetry, memoir comics, mixed-media fiction collage with a dash of cultural critique, digital or drawn media—all fall in the broad spectrum of possibilities! All contributors will be paid $30 for accepted work.

Please send us one piece per submission of 3,000 words or less (ten pages or less of graphic media). All submissions must be the author’s original, unpublished work.

In your cover letter, please specify in a sentence how your submitted piece blurs the line between textual genre.

Submissions will be open until July 15. The issue will be released in late summer.

FICTION

Word count: 1,200–6,000 words

Please submit one short fiction piece at a time. Stories shorter than 1,200 words should be submitted under Flash Fiction. Texts should be double-spaced in 12pt Times New Roman or a similar serif typeface. Redivider will happily consider genre fiction with strong enough prose, though hard science fiction, high fantasy, etc. will probably fit better at another journal.

Things we already see a lot of:
• Excessive body writing (hands, eyes, eyebrows, throats, mouths, breaths, chills in the spine, etc.)
• Stories about terminal illness
• Privileged family fiction
• Descriptions of the sun and its rays and the color of the sky on the opening page

Things we wish we saw more:
• Satisfying endings
• Characters with complex motives
• Dark humor
• Consistent voice throughout the piece
• Elements of sci-fi and mysticism
• Psychological thrillers
• Real science and real history utilized for theme and setting, (i.e. background research)
• Cli-fi

FLASH FICTION

Word count: 1,200 words or less

Please submit no more than three flash fiction pieces per submission. These pieces will be evaluated by the Redivider Fiction Team and published in a dedicated section apart from other full-length short fiction. Texts should be double-spaced in 12pt Times New Roman or a similar serif typeface.

Redivider prefers flash fiction that tells a whole story or describes a scene or situation. Works that function more as meditations on a subject, or which contain little movement or direction may best be considered prose poetry, and should be submitted under Poetry.

Please see the Fiction guidelines for more guidance on content.

POETRY

Length guidelines: 5 poems max, preferably 10–60 lines per poem

Please submit no more than five poems per submission, up to ten pages, as a single document. We prefer poems around 10–60 lines in length, to best accommodate our online format. We can publish poetry featuring complex enjambment and indentation, but please be reasonable with longer poems, as each work must be carefully typeset, line-by-line, to show up as the artist intended on a web page.

We are looking for new and under-published voices. Submit what you’re worried to send elsewhere. We want poems that circumvent the familiar, that break through abstraction to examine a moment or concept from the side, rather than straight on. We want poems that shift understanding, that reveal core, unexpected truths.

 MEMOIR & PERSONAL ESSAY

Word count: 6,000 words or less

Please submit a single piece of nonfiction personal essay or memoir to this category. Texts should be double-spaced in 12pt Times New Roman or a similar serif typeface. Journalistic works, criticism and commentary, and texts containing substantial background research should be submitted under Nonfiction.

CULTURAL COMMENTARY & CRITIQUE

Word count: 8,000 words or less

Please submit a single piece of cultural commentary/critique. We accept both casual and academic-style manuscripts for this genre. These may be essays regarding US or non-US culture. Essays in translation are also welcome. Texts should be double-spaced in 12pt Times New Roman or a similar serif typeface.