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.
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 50th issue (Volume 13, no 2) 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.
Its summer and it's hot. Tempers flare, and there is uncertainty in the air. Are we witnessing the implosion of Western Civilization or is this just a hiccup in the flow of history? It is almost sure that future historians will revel in their description of what is now. Once the passions have wained, and the cold eye of history deconstructs what went wrong (or right) will we see a new shiny period or the dismembering of society?
Many of us (and we suspect most of our readers) are liberal in our political inclinations. For most of our history, the United States has had a liberalizing force amongst its population. There have always been the demigods that have pulled us into wars and hatred of those not like us but, for the most part, that fades after a while. After all, we have “socialized” roads, police and fire, education up to 12th grade, and even a “socialized” retirement package called Social Security, as well as the rump of a “socialized” form of medical care. What’s the point of government besides doing what the individual can’t do for themselves? This is the historical undercurrent in U.S. politics. Most of us believe that, in the end, most civilized countries will end up having more, or less, the same policies.
However, there is another undercurrent that drives our fear of the future, that is the systematic destruction or rather dismantlement of the political institutions we have created over the last century. The urge to destroy sounds familiar. NATO and the EU are being systemically attacked from within; so too was the Delian League before the Peloponnesian War. Those who refuse to understand history ….
The good news, if you call it that, is that just before every big crash, there is always a flowering of the arts. It’s as if the added tension, fear, and adrenalin stir the creative pot and produces gold. The entire population of Athens at the time of Socrates was around 100,000 souls. The bad news is that periods like that never last very long. There are so many of us around today that one has to wonder if there is a Socrates among our writers, an Aristophanes waiting in the wings, or another Einstein boring himself to death in the patent office.
A wonderful collection of essays came in over the transom this Spring. Our essays range from a war memoir to a dissertation on writing letters by hand and lots more.
Our fiction editor loves Anton Chekhov and despairs the notion that there are no latter day Chekhov's submitting works. This is not to say that the work we receive 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:
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 We have gotten a little incestuous lately.
In this issue, we have Lee Varon reviewing Julia Carlson's book and vice versa. We didn't do that intentionally ... it just happened that way. Of course, Dennis Daly gives us two reviews.
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:
