PFN – Call for Submisions to Potomac Review. Theme: The Other

We welcome poetry, short fiction, essays, and meditations the topic. Writers may interpret these themes in a myriad of ways. For inspiration, we offer excerpts from our recent editor’s note “A Reconciliatory Approach”

“The initial seed of inspiration brings with it restraint and empathy, humility, and gratitude for whomever is abroad, and the decision to share does not include the decision to disqualify, for the decision to share is by definition reconciliatory; the poet will never meet but even a small percentage of their readers. Like othering, not seeing is also a choice. We are not the only ones who observe and perhaps even engage in forms of mimesis. Just as self implies other, the seen implicates the unseen. Much can be seen and understood, but there is an ever-vanishing horizon, and the other, and the unseen, call into this future. Seeing and failure to see are literary matters, and while our themed issues will be capacious enough to allow for each writer’s vision—transgressive, disruptive, queer, representative of the animal turn in the Anthropocene—they will be defining enough to proscribe that vision into the form of a task, an aesthetic task, where literature is itself seen as a form of reconciliation that does not recognize otherness, difference, disfiguration, or boundaries except as an also-I where the unseen is that aspect of artistic creation that is ahead of its time, that reveals itself as what has not yet been seen. ”

General Submission Guidelines:

Please send us only one submission at a time per reading period. Send your work via Submittable at PotomacReview.Submittable.com.

We try to respond within four to six months.

We happily read simultaneous submissions, but ask that you let us know as soon as a work has found a new home. Please see guidelines below for withdrawing your work if another publication has accepted it.

We do not accept multiple submissions. We cannot accept submissions from individuals currently associated with Montgomery College.

Contributors will be compensated with two complimentary copies and a 40% discount for additional copies.

Thank you! We look forward to reading your work.

Poetry

Please send us up to five poems per poetry submission.

If any of your poems have been accepted elsewhere, please leave a note in your submission specifying which were selected for publication, and we’ll consider the remaining poems.

Fiction

While we don’t have specific word limits for fiction submissions, we are, like everyone else, constrained by final page counts. The longer the work, the more difficult it is to find room for it; we typically find it difficult to make room for works that run much longer than 7,500 words. On the other hand, we’ve never turned down something we loved.

We only ask that you withdraw your submission if it has been accepted elsewhere. And please, only send us one submission at a time. Thank you.

Nonfiction

There are no specific word limits for nonfiction submissions, though like everyone else, we are constrained by page counts, and the longer a piece of work, the more difficult it is to find room for it. We typically find it difficult to make room for works that run much longer than 7,500 words. However, we’ve never not been able to publish something we love.
Please note that we do not publish academic essays; we’re interested solely in creative nonfiction.
We only ask that you send one submission at a time (no multiple submissions), and that you withdraw your submission if it has been accepted elsewhere.