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 licence to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up untill 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 twenty ninth issue (Volume 8, 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 have just published their latest anthology).
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.
Somehow we all knew it couldn't last. This is the year the free Internet ceased to exist. It costs real money to read the New York Times among other things. Amazon has upped the number of hits we need before they'll pay us anything and Google's Ads haven't paid us anything in years. If our page looks sparse that's why. We've removed all the ads that don't pay us anything.
Google must be hurting. Google has told us that we can't expand our google-mail any further without paying for it. We are also reaching the limits of our free version of Submittable, our submissions manager. We have four editors and one intern on our Submittable Editors List and that's the limit. We are also nearing the monthly limit of 100 free submitted poems, articles, reviews etc. If we charge for submissions, like many other journals do, we would have to charge at least $2.00 since submittable charges $1.00 per submission. We'd prefer to keep our literary review free. Finally the java gadget that once allowed us to display a window linked to Doug Holder's book review blog now costs $9.00 a month so unfortunately we have had to drop it.
Fortunately our hosting service still only costs WHLR $30.00 an issue, however we are getting very close to our accumulated limit in disk space. In about a year we'll have to start paying for more space or drop access to some of our older issues. Our hosting provider calls us a "legacy client" this could be interpreted as a good thing (we were one of their first) or a bad thing (something to be gotten rid of). Either way, it makes us nervous.
Still, Wilderness House Literary Review is a labor of love for all of us and we'll continue to publish any way we can. We'd like to thank the handful of people who have generously donated to this enterprise throughout the years (through the PayPal button) and we hope you'll stay with us. If you have any good ideas or would like to buy an ad, please let us know. Additionally, buying some of the products listed on our page would help to support WHLR.
We are thrilled to have between 2,500 and 5,000 "unique" readers over the life of each issue. It's a drop in the Internet bucket but as we learned (at the AWP conference in Boston) that even some of the most prestigious printed literary journals only have circulations in the low hundreds.
For all the doom and gloom of late winter, the crocuses just bloomed and the robins have been back for a week searching for worms in the still frozen yard here in New England. We'd also like to thank our delightful intern Teisha Twomey for her devoted reading of the hundred or so fiction entries we have recieved. Welcome to our Spring issue. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have.
Our fiction editor loves Anton Chekhov and despairs the notion that there are no latter day Chekhovs submitting works for her consideration. This is not to say that the work he 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:
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.
Regrettably we can no longer provide a free window onto our review blog, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene. If you'd like to see dozens of new
book reviews posted every week please go HERE.
The Black Buddhist
by Meikle Paschal
(Ibbetson Street Press)
http://ibbetsonpress.com $15
Review by Afaa Michael Weaver
Lake Effect
Poems by Christina Cook
Finishing Line Press
www.finishinglinepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-62229-0628, 29 Pages, $14.00
Review by Dennis Daly
If One of Us Should Fall
by Nicole Terez Dutton
Pitt Poetry Series
University of Pittsburgh Press
www.upress.pitt.edu
copyright 2012, 75 pages
Review by Lo Galluccio
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 seventh
anthology. You may purchase them here:
