Wilderness House Literary Review

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.

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

Welcome to the 75th issue (Volume 19, no 3) 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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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.

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Our ISSN number is 2156-0153.

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Table of Contents

Opine
Search
Art
Fiction

Essays
Poetry
Review
Cumulative Index

Opine

For the Good Old Days ... Again

We are certainly living through interesting times and it’s becoming easier to understand why that is an ancient Chinese curse. In the past politics could be thought of as an intellectual exchange of competing ideas. Lately, however, it’s become a burden. One side’s intransigent insistence on a cult of personality and the other side’s instance on rational thought is exhausting. Most of us hope for the success of rational behavior however far that may depart from our well thought out ideals of what should be done. By our Winter issue we hope that we again live in somewhat dull times. Assuming that to be the case we will attempt to return to what we consider out primary mission: the promotion of literature, art, and interesting ideas.

Wilderness House serves two functions. We publish this online magazine and we publish books that otherwise might not find a home in print. Most of our books are very short run books of poetry but we also publish the occasional novel and on even more rare occasions books that might be considered philosophy. We rely on the poets themselves to promote their work. Novels can generally be classified into genres and promoted along well known channels but what do you do with a book that’s a mix of science, religion, psychology and physiology, a deep look into the philosophy of existence? We’ve been scratching our heads for almost a year.

We’ve known the author for almost fifty years. He’s been writing this book for almost fifty years and it’s gone through two different private editions before we agreed to take it on. In that time it’s had a change in titles that may, or may not, explain what the books about. The author, Laurence McKinney, coined the term “Neurotheology” and the first edition was titled, “Neurotheology, Virtual Religion in the 21st Century.” We’ve added a more concise title (we hope), “It’s All In Your Mind” with a subtitle, “The Virtual Basis of Religion, Sex, Time, and Death.” Why do most religions have an afterlife? McKinney explains what happens as we physically fail: we experience a time dilation and if we survive a near-death experience, know what it’s like to “pass over.”

If you’re intrigued you can get it here: Neurotheology. Or, for the first dozen or so who promises to read the book and write a review on Amazon you can pick up an e-book here:

We offer two versions e-pub and mobi. Note, we'll keep these up until we get a dozen takers.

Search the house

Art

Nathaniel Devarie

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.