Deadlines are as follows
March 1 – Spring
June 1 – Summer
September 1 – Autumn
December 1 – Winter
Please read this section before submitting work.
Please include some form of identification in the work itself.
All submissions must be in electronic form. Our preference is an MS Word file uploaded through the system below. Please do not send us pdf files. We can't use them.
By submitting work to us you grant us a non-exclusive license to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up until the issue deadline (see above).
We don't pay so you retain all copyrights. If we publish your work online we may include it in a printed edition.
Poetry may be submitted in any length. Please don't submit 100 poems and ask us to pick 3.
Fiction may be submitted in three formats:
very short stories less than 500 words in length
short stories less than 1000 words in length
Short stories that don’t fit the above should be less than 3000 words.
We also accept longer forms of fiction occasionally.
Please, one fiction submission only per author, per issue. If you
submit multiple stories for a single issue, we reserve the right not
to review additional stories you submit after the first one.
Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some
interesting footnotes. Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000
words
Book Reviews should be positive unless the author
is a well-known blowhard. Our mission is to encourage literature not
discourage it..
Art: Minimun of 6 pieces. Please incluce a bio and statement about your work. Any form of art may be submitted with the constraint that
it must be something that can be published in 2 dimensions. It’s hard to
publish sculpture but illustrations together with some intelligent prose
count.
Published works are welcome with proper attribution.
Welcome to the 73rd issue (Volume 19, no 1) of the Wilderness
House Literary Review. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a
group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards.
Lets get this out of the way. We use cookies, everyone uses cookies. Our cookies just tell us how many people take a look at Wilderness House Literary Review. Over the life of an issue we get about 4000 unique visitors. The cookies tell us who’s unique. If that's a problem We're sorry. Enough of that.
The stories, articles, poems and examples of art have
been presented as PDF files. This is a format that
allows for a much cleaner presentation than would otherwise be available on
the web. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader (used to read a PDF file) on your
computer you can download one from the Adobe website. These files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading
then, however we think the beauty of the words deserves a beautiful presentation.
Finally, the
copyrights are owned by their respective authors whose opinions are theirs
alone and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or partners.
Wilderness House, like all magazines both online and print, is dedicated to celebrating creativity. When curating submissions we often fall under the spell of “where on earth did that come from.” Unique thoughts or images are the hallmark of these creative products but where did they come from? What gives rise to the flowering of the muse? We’ve given this a lot of thought and debate to this and, while we don’t have an answer, we do have some interesting observations. There are three parts to creativity: The itch, the talent, and the craft. Masterpieces are the embodiment of all three aspects applied collectively.
The itch: we all get it. The urge to write a poem, take a brush to canvas, build a house or bake a cake. It’s the desire or impulse to create something. The itch is a prerequisite for any creativity but it’s not enough. For many of us the itch manifests itself in many different directions, literature, visual art, music, etc, and while satisfying in the moment may not lead to a brilliant work of creation.
Talent: Talent is an innate quality that seems to be dished out at random by the fates. Not every aspiring artist, poet, or writer. has the talent to create a masterpiece but that never quelled an itch. Still, we’ve all seen creative talent, gone to waste by sloth. A strong itch combined with talent often yields what has come to be known as “one-hit wonders.”
For many critics, the craft takes precedence over native talent and perhaps it should. Craft is what’s taught in school. Practicing the craft is what aspiring artists do when they fill volume after volume with stories, poems, or drawings. Mastering the craft is what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about when he said that it required 10,000 hours for the outliers to master their creative outlets. Picasso, Van Gough, and even Winston Churchill painted thousands of canvases. The Beatles played over 10,000 hours on stage before recording their first hits in the early 1960s.
The one thing that has left us wondering is the environment that encourages this creativity. There are short bursts of creativity usually during periods of social chaos followed by long periods of … drought. The majority of classical Greek literature and art was created in just a 100-year timespan between 400 and 300 BCE. Athens had a population of about 200,000 including slaves. Today the United States of America has a population of ~330 million. If creativity was just a function of population the United States should have over 1600 Socrates, Platos, and Aristotles but we don’t. Perhaps the current climate of political chaos will lead to a massive period of creativity. We’re not sure that's a good idea.
There is, sometimes, a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. We have several essays that muddy that line, again. I've been assured by the authors that their stories rightly belong here and not in our fiction section. You can be the judge of that.
