SUBMIT

  

©Photograph by Clapboard House

NOTICE

Submission period:  April 1st to July 1st.  Although we are usually open year round for submission, we have received a record number of fine submissions, necessitating this change.    

 

We are accepting submissions of short stories and poems.  Our emphasis is the American South, but we will consider all quality writing.  Our only steadfast requirement is excellence.   

We will consider one short story up to 3000 words or 3 poems during a submission period.  Send one single spaced story or three poems as a Word.doc to clapboardhouse@msn.com.  At the end of your story please include a short biography, including prior or forthcoming publication credits. 

For our purposes we consider Flash to be no more than 1000 words.  It can be as few as 100 words, but it has to be a story, not a slice of life moment that reads like an unfinished—aborted short story.  Flash is the most difficult short fiction form to pull off, but the most satisfying for writer and reader when the story succeeds. 

We encourage simultaneous submissions.  Any editor who asks for exclusive consideration of your work for an indefinite period of time is not an experienced writer.  There are many good writers submitting quality work.  Unless you have just won a Pulitzer or have an established rapport with a publication or editor, send your best work out to numerous publications you have vetted.  If your work is accepted elsewhere before you hear from us, just drop us an email and we will be very happy for you!

A well written story is like the perfect circle.  To date no one has been able to reinvent the circle.  We will consider experimental work that is inventive and imaginative.  We might be compatible if you read Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Allan Gurganus, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Jill McCorkle, Janet Kauffman, Natasha Tretheway, Mark Richard, or Dorothy Allison. 

We accept submissions by established, unpublished, or emerging writers. 

We are not interested in reading porn, religious rants, homophobic tirades, sexist tomes, or racist manifestos.   We are interested in well written stories that do not play on cliches and stereotypes. 

We ask for one-time online publication and one-time print publication rights should Clapboard House choose to publish a print anthology.