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 60th issue (Volume 15, 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.
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 1500 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.
A year ago, we wrote about how black lives did matter; we viewed that as the single greatest failure of American society. We were wrong. Donald Trump could have been a hero. His malfeasance in other matters could have been overlooked. Instead, he chose to ignore the advice of his scientists and favor his buddies in big business. The economy was booming, and he could reasonably claim credit for it politically.
If he had gung-ho worn a mask, if he had gung-ho given a "blood, sweat and tears" speech, if he had only been willing to admit that his opinion could change with new information. If only ….
His vanity has killed more Americans in a shorter span of time than any war America has ever been in besides its Civil War. To keep his arrogant, ignorant base hungry and devoted, he has thrown the bate of another civil war at their feet, and they have groveled and snarled like a pack of hungry maltreated dogs. Trump lost the election, that is certain. He could have been a hero, and he could have won. But had he won, the American experiment in democracy might well have come to an end.
In 2008, Marsha Russell began writing poems documenting each abusive case of a black man or woman being killed or poorly treated in the extreme. This September Wilderness House Press published, “This is why we kneel.” We hope that this slim volume of poems triggers a dialogue that, somehow, begins to heal this problem. We are not born racists; we learn it. We hope that this volume explains to a mostly white audience why people of color are scared and, perhaps, change their behavior.
A wonderful collection of essays came in over the transom this Fall.
We have the pleasure of presenting the story of Charles Hayes trip to Vietnam in 1968. It's almost a book, and we hope it will become one eventually. As usual, we had to ask if this was a novelette:
