Farrago's Wainscot will be closed to submissions from June 1–August 31, 2008. Submissions received during this period will be deleted unread.
To increase your chances of acceptance, please familiarize yourself with what we publish prior to submitting. We are open to all themes, styles, and content, though the presence of the strange, bizarre, or uncanny (in some form) is a must. We accept only electronic submissions. Publication pays $5.00 for worldwide electronic rights, which revert to the author after three months.
FictionLength: 1,000–10,000 words. Works under 1,000 words should be submitted to Behind the Wainscot.
Style: Projects of all styles are welcome; however, we favor those stories that challenge or expand standard narrative approaches. Experimental, cross-genre, and other interstitial forms are some of the primary foci of Farrago's Wainscot. For your sake and ours, however, familiarize yourself with what has already been done in these categories within the field prior to submitting. All fiction submissions must, in some way, address the strange, bizarre, uncanny, or sublime.
Format: Use standard manuscript format. This is to ease and normalize our reading—if you make us struggle to get through reader-unfriendly formatting, we probably won't bother.
Poetry
Length: Submit up to 6 poems at a time. Well crafted and ambitious long poems and series are welcome and will be considered.Format: Always justify poems to the left unless there's a valid formal reason to do otherwise.
Style: No "greeting card" or "journal-entry-with-line-breaks" verse—otherwise all subjects, styles, and forms welcome. Turn-ons include poems attentive to the musicality of language, poems that do their work subtly and surprisingly, formal poems where the form goes unnoticed, strong image and metaphor, poems that pass the "so what?" test. Turn-offs include didactic rants, clichés, willfully impenetrable abstraction, Beat-revivalism. Some favorite poets include Albert Goldbarth, Li-Young Lee, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bob Hicok, Edward Hirsch, W.S. Merwin, James Merrill, James Dickey, Tony Hoagland, Billy Collins, Adam Zagajewski, Czeslaw Milozc, Wislawa Szymborska, Yeats, Eliot, Lorca, Frost, Stevens, Akhmatova, Coleridge, Keats, Swinburne, Robert Browning. Rainer Maria Rilke is god.
Nonfiction
If you would like to submit a nonfiction article, please ensure that either the subject matter or your approach to it sympathizes somehow with our mission statement. We are particularly interested in extra-literary items, topics, events, or other phenomena that involve themselves in some fashion with the bizarre, the uncanny, or the inexplicable.
Email formatted submissions as attached .rtf files to wainscot.editors @ gmail.com, and include "Wainscot Submission: [category]" in the subject line. Use the body of the email for your cover letter.
Response time is between one and three months. Simultaneous submissions welcome; however, we ask that you notifiy us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
Do not send additional submissions (within the same category) before we have responded to your first. Disregarding our preferences regarding attached vs. embedded submissions will result in us disregarding your work.
We no longer accept reprint submissions.
