PFN – Call for Submissions to Exist Otherwise Literary Journal Issue 14. Theme: We Are Not Going Back!

To be honest, I posted a theme and prompt for Issue 14 a couple weeks before the election. But I completely freaked out when I woke up Nov. 6 and saw the election results. I was shocked and horrified. I was also triggered. I felt shame and betrayal at what this country has become. I had to take some time off and I had to re-focus.

Issue 14 will be a reaction, a declaration of resistance, a doubling down of queer and trans voices. Claude Cahun and her partner, Marcel Moore, were strident anti-fascists. They were so active in the resistance that they were captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. They only escaped that fate by the end of the war. So here’s the new theme for 14:

We Are Not Going Back!

What to Submit

Writing

We accept any kind of written work: poetry, prose, essays, fiction, creative non-fiction, scripts, hybrid, experimental writing, whatever.

500 Words or Less: You may submit up to three (3) per issue.

500-1000 Words: You may submit up to one (1) per issue.

What Not to Submit

• Don’t submit work that you do not have the rights to.
• Erotica is fine, but nothing explicit.
• We appreciate horror as a genre, but it’s not what we’re looking for.
• No hate, racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, torture, gratuitous violence, or anything that aspires to cause harm.

How to Submit

What follows are our requirements for submissions of work to us. We will not typically reject a submission if it doesn’t meet these requirements exactly. However, any contributor who consistently submits work that is sloppy or hard to understand, is less likely to receive a notice of acceptance.

We require submissions to come from our Submission Form. This allows us to better keep track of them.

Writing Submissions Format

We accept works submitted in plain text, .rtf, .doc, .docx, or .pdf.

If your work requires any special formatting, pdf is suggested. In some cases, it might make sense to send your work as an image, in which case, jpg is fine.

Style Guide for Writing Submissions

• Typeface – The only thing we care about is that we can read your work with ease and clarity. Serif and Sans Serif are both fine, but please use something common, such as Times or Helvetica.
• Type size – Goldilocks! (Not too small, not too large.) 11-13 points is ideal.
• Page Size – We don’t care, as long as the work is readable.
• Margins – We don’t care, as long as the work is readable.
• Line Spacing (Leading) – We don’t care, as long as the work is readable.
• Type & Background Color – Black on white is preferred.
• Special Situations – Some contemporary writing breaks conventions and incorporates elements of visual art and/or experimentation. This is wonderful. The use of specialized fonts, typefaces, or type sizing, mixed typefaces, special characters, etc. is all the more reason to submit work in PDF or JPG format. We reserve the right to treat some of these types of work as text-based, and some as visual art. But we can’t make any broad guidelines here. These kinds of works will necessarily involve conversations between author and publisher so that decisions can be made jointly.

Written work will be formatted and displayed according to our internal style guide. Any exceptions to this must be negotiated on an individual basis.

Payment

• We pay $15 per published written work.
• Payment is issued within 1-3 days of publishing.

We can only guarantee payment through Paypal or Venmo. If you are unable to use either of those, let us know ahead of time and we’ll try to work something out.

Rights

Upon completion of the Contributor Agreement (sent by email with notice of acceptance), we reserve the right to publish your submitted work on this site, and in a downloadable PDF version of the issue. Both of these shall remain available here for a minimum of 60 days from the publish date.

Our right to publish your work is not exclusive. You may publish it elsewhere while it is published here.

After 60 days, you may request that your work be removed for any reason. Absent such request, your work will remain available on the web site and in a downloadable PDF for as long as this journal continues.

We retain no other rights to your work.