We are primarily interested in "interstitial" literature that features (in some form), the strange, bizarre, or uncanny.
We accept only electronic submissions. Publication pays $20.00 (currently, via PayPal) for worldwide electronic rights, which revert to the author after three months.
Length: 2,000–8,000 words.
Style: Experimental, cross-genre, or other interstitial forms that challenge or expand standard narrative mechanics. All fiction submissions should, in some way, address the strange, bizarre, uncanny, or sublime.
Format: Use standard manuscript format.
Length: Submit up to 6 poems at a time. Well crafted and ambitious long poems and series are welcome and will be considered.
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.
Format: Always justify poems to the left unless there's a valid formal reason to do otherwise.
We seek articles, editorials, or other nonfiction forms that address the bizarre, the uncanny, or the inexplicable in art and culture.
Email formatted submissions as attached .doc or .rtf files to wainscot.editors @ gmail.com, and include your material's category (fiction, poetry, etc.) in the subject line. Use the body of the email for your cover letter.
Response time is between one and three months. Simultaneous submissions are welcome; however, we ask that you notifiy us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere. Please do not query us regarding the status of a submission until our maximum posted response time has elapsed.
Send only one submission per category (fiction, poetry, etc.) at a time. Please send a separate email for each category; do not attach, for example, both fiction and poetry submissions to the same email—however, if you're submitting multiple poems at once, you may attach them all to the same email. Do not reply to our submission-response emails with new submissions, as the new material will be lost in our archiving system. Instead, send a new email each time you submit.
We disregard submissions that are pasted into the body of an email.
We do not consider reprints or excerpts.
