PFN – Call for Submissions to The Fourth River. Theme: For the Birds

FOR THE BIRDS

If there is one animal that has consistently shown up in the submissions to The Fourth River, for at least the last ten years, it would be the feathered, winged ones that rule the skies.

Birds.

In fact, there have been so many birds bursting from poems, stories and essays that it has become a bit of an inside joke and also a teaching opportunity for graduate student editors engaging with the genre we call Nature Writing in the 21st century. Okay, birds, I tell them. But how are these birds special? If we can expect them to arrive in flocks, how can we spot the ones that stand out?

Okay, birds, we say.

But they had better surprise us!

2025 marks 20 years of publication for The Fourth River and in this anniversary year, instead of looking at them slightly askance, we’ve decided we want to embrace them!

So, bring us your birds! Your bevies and coveys, your murders and unkindnesses, your nests. Your bowers and roosts, your migration routes. Your claws and plumage, hollow bones and elliptical wings. Bring us swoop and sail and alight and soar.

Bring us eggs.

Bring pet birds flying around your living room and owls hunting mice under the moon. Bring literature and myth and extinction. Bring ravens and mockingbirds. Griffin and Harpy and Phoenix and Thoth. Archaeopteryx. Bring Quetzalcoatlus. Dodo. Great Auk.

Bring us delicate hummingbirds, sure. But also those small brown scrappy ones, nondescript and muscled out by the Cardinal-bullies at the feeder outside your window. Bring us pigeon and chicken and the un-lovely buzzard. Remind us that cassowaries can’t, but turkeys sure can, fly.

Let us hear their chirps and screeches.

Let us hear them sing.

For our fall, 2025 digital issue, we welcome your poems, essays and stories about birds.

Please send 3-5 poems or up to 4,000 words of prose at a time.

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We welcome submissions of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction that explore the relationship between humans and their environments, both natural and built, urban, rural or wild. We are looking for writing that is richly situated at the confluence of place, space and identity—or that reflects upon or makes use of landscape and place in new ways.

For all our submissions, themed or otherwise, we welcome especially work by writers who are part of marginalized groups: immigrant and indigenous writers; writers of color; women, non-binary, LGBQA and trans writers; writers with disabilities both visible and invisible. Send us your best work!