“Summertime…and the living is easy”

 –George Gershwin, from “Porgy and Bess”

Summertime is easy, isn’t it? Lemonade and salad for dinner and a yard sprinkler for entertainment. However, if you’re a writer of small things – essays, poems, stories – summer can be a harder time to submit work to be considered for publication*.

For U.S.-based writers, this is partly because many lit mags are published by colleges and universities, using  faculty and student love, labor, and time; as the institutions go quiescent in the summer, so do the lit. mags. But more generally, the publishing world is a bit becalmed, probably because the folks who manage all those innovative print and online venues finally get a chance to travel, fulfill family commitments, go to writing workshops & retreats, and even get some sleep.

The result is that it’s a little harder to find places to send stuff. If you’re on Duotrope, the familiar refrain, “We do not read submissions between June and September,” can get a little depressing. So to make the summer easier for those of us who are going into submission mode, I’m going to try to provide periodic updates on venues that are looking for summer submissions. And with that, today’s picks:

• The Labletter: originally a project focusing on Oregon writers, they’ve broadened scope and publish poetry, prose, and art, on the edgy end but still accessible. Their next deadline for submissions is July 15th.
• NANO Fiction: a great venue for flash fiction generally, their NANO Prize contest is open until September 1st, winners to be announced end of that month
• WhiteKnucklePress: a project from team members at Right Hand Pointing, White Knuckle Press publishes e-chapbooks of prose poems. This month’s chapbook is terrific, and better yet, they are once again open to submissions as of June 1st.
• And speaking of Right Hand Pointing: RHP is always looking for new poetry and they use a rolling-acceptance model. Currently, they’re reading for their non-themed August issue and a themed September issue on “Beds, Bedtime, Bedroom, Sleep.”
• Writers Rising Up: if you’re a nature writer or an eco-focussed poet, this group publishes honest, non-sentimental work about the beauty of the natural world. They have contests year-round; they’ve just opened to submissions for next year’s WRUP calendar with a deadline of August 1st.

Okay, now I’ve got myself  all fired up – if you have any other venues that are looking for work over the summer, please come share it with the rest of the InOurBooks community – we really want to hear about places you love to read and share great work ~ Ina

*Andrea isn’t here to tell me if this is also the experience of novelists and other book-length writers. If you’re in that arena, do you find summers more difficult for submissions? Do agents tend to have their vacation emails on? Are publishers slower to read work over the summer?