Wilderness House Literary Review

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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.

Please submit all works electronically. Click here to submit to Wilderness House Literary Review

Welcome to the 76th issue (Volume 19, no 4) 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.

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Table of Contents

Opine
Search
Art
Fiction

Essays
Poetry
Review
Cumulative Index

Opine

These are the Good Old Days?

It seems we are still living in interesting times. We could hope that the old Chinese curse is inaccurate or we could embrace the times and look for some bright side in the events of the day. It’s certain that historians years from now will be having a field day. We can imagine some future Edward Gibbon writing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire a thousand years hence. But more to the point who are the Suetonius, Livy, Plutarch, and Lucian of our day. They too lived through “interesting times,” and recognized the failings of their political and economic system. It seems that “interesting times” are a stimulus for the arts. Indeed the Golden Age of Greece, roughly 550 BC to 350 BC, was marked by continuous wars and the slow destruction of the Grecian city-state culture ending with the conquests and death of Alexander the Great. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Xenophon, Sophocles, Thucydides, and others, all lived through this “interesting” epoch.

So what of our current interesting period? Current history, that instant just past “now,” is dominated by loud, egotistical thugs seeking to control our destiny for their own ends. Past history shows that this rarely ends well for the egotists. By most measures, their dominance often come to abrupt and often violent ends but only after the rest of us pay an enormous price. Almost a million Russians have lost their lives to indulge the fantasies of Vladimir Putin. Similarly, nearly 100,000 Palestinians have died to indulge the antisemitic vision of a group called Hamas. It goes on and on and ….

At the beginning of the first millennium the worlds population is estimated to have been about 250 million, the world’s population is over 8 billion today. That is 32 times larger. Are there 32 Sophocles, Platos, Socrates, Suetonius’, Livy’s, and Plutarchs? Wilderness House will be happy to publish them. If you look hard enough there is a silver lining in everything.

Search the house

Art

Essay

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.