PFN – Open Minds Quarterly Seeking Submissions on the Theme of “Identity”

The theme for Winter 2024 is: Identity

How has your experience with mental health challenges, mental illness, madness, and/or neurodivergence shaped your identity? How do other identities intersect with your experience? Have mental health challenges, mental illness, madness, and/or neurodivergence affected the way you see yourself? What about others? Do you feel your identity is understood by others? What would you like to tell them about it? We want to here all about how identity affects your lived experiences.

We encourage you to consider this theme and incorporate it into your work. Pieces that follow the theme will have a much higher chance of being selected for this issue than pieces that don’t follow the theme.

Nonfiction, reviews,  and letters, should relate specifically to experiences of madness or mental health challenges. Poetry, fiction, or visual art submissions do not need to focus on madness/mental health, but we may prioritize pieces that fit our mandate and this issue’s theme.

We focus on publishing contributors with lived experience and work based on first-hand experience. We do not publish work that tells other people’s stories for them or tells second-hand stories about them.

Open Minds Quarterly is a literary journal that features explorations of life in a mad world. We welcome writing and art from people with lived experience of what is variously called mental health challenges, mental illness, madness, and neurodiversity. We strive to promote these voices and perspectives by publishing work based on first-hand lived experience.

You may submit to ONE of these categories per submission period:

• Nonfiction: 1 piece limit, 3000 word maximum.
• Fiction: 1 piece limit, 3000 word maximum.
• Poetry: 4 piece limit, 96 lines maximum per poem (this includes stanza breaks, but not the title).