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.
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.
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..
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 37th issue (Volume 10, 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 (who keep publishing their anthologies).
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.
Wow, so we begin our tenth year. When we started Wilderness House Literary Review nine years ago it was out of frustration. The group of poets and writers known as “The Bagel Bards” were creating a larger body of work than they knew how to place with conventional publishers. These were not your average wanta-be-a-writers, many had won prestigious fellowships and awards, and were well known in the literary community. Print has a limit in the number of stories or poems that can be published. For example, The Atlantic Monthly has slots for exactly 16 fiction stories per year and receives something approaching 20,000 submissions. So we decided to put Wilderness House Literary Review online where the only real limitations are the time and patience of the editors.
While many of “The Bards” had jobs in “The Academy,” none were part of the academic elite. Indeed many were criticized for deliberately being anti-academics. Anti-elite would describe the majority better. So it was also decided that none of the work published in Wilderness House Literary Review would carry a biography. Thus the work of a Pulitzer Prize nominee might be placed next to that of a high school student. We decided that the work should stand on its own and that the provenance of the author was irrelevant. Of course you might recognize such names as Afaa Michael Weaver or DeWitt Henry but you might also read a mini-memoir by Hannah Kuhn and wonder if she too is a famous name. Look them all up in Bing or Google if you really want to know. But in the mean time enjoy what we hope will be some of the best writing you may find on the Internet.
Yes, we plan on throwing a big party some time next spring. We hope all our writers can attend. None of us are good at planning parties so if you like that sort of thing and live in the Boston area, get in touch.
A wonderful collection of essays came in over the transom this Winter. Our essays range from an apologia for going to a swankey boarding school, a teenage memior, a Christmas essay as well as a pub crawl through Dublin, and a few others that are equally amusing.
Our fiction editor loves Anton Chekhov and despairs the notion that there are no latter day Chekhov's submitting works for her consideration. This is not to say that the work she receives isn’t excellent … it’s just not Chekhov. To that end WHLReview announces a new prize for fiction to be called “the Chekhov Prize.” A Google search reveals several other Chekhov prizes with cash. Alas we’re not offering cash. We will look for a bearded bobble-head doll. In the mean time we have T-shirts with the Chekhov Prize logo available. Just click on Chekhov's head.
For your reading pleasure we offer an outstanding collection of short stories by:
We are pleased to offer Part III of Geoffrey Craig'sSnow
(Part I can be found here, part II here)
Our poetry editor, not wanting to be outdone by our fiction editor is pleased to announce the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry. Anyone published in Volume 3 (and beyond) is eligible. We don't have any idea what the prize will consist of - a T-shirt for sure. Perhaps we can find a Plaster of Paris bust of Julius Caesar, put a rose in its mouth and decorate it to look like Gertrude Stein. In the mean time we have T-shirts with the our rose prize logo available. Just click on Gerturde's head.
The widget server that once provided a smooth scrolling region for our reviews has gone the way of the Dodo and no replacement has been found so we'll just have to point you to The Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
As we said when we started this is a joint
production of Wilderness House Literary Retreat and the “bagel bards”.
The “Bagel Bards” have just published their nineth
anthology. You may purchase them here:
