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 thirty second issue (Volume 8, 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 (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.
Wilderness House Literary Review began when a bunch of writers were meeting for breakfast and someone complained that the number of venues for literary works had declined to the point where no one knew where to send their works anymore. A long discussion about the decline in the literary public ensued but it didn’t answer the question, if you’ve written a poem or a short story, where can you send it? It was collectively decided that we should start our own and this editor foolishly volunteered to create it. That was 8 years ago, we begin our ninth year.
There was a time, just a generation or two ago, when there were hundreds of paying outlets for literary creations. Many newspapers published poetry as well as fiction. Many, if not most, of the great 19th and early 20th century novels first appeared in serial form in daily newspapers or weekly magazines. Moving into the middle of the 20th century there were many popular magazines that regularly carried fiction (as well as “creative” non-fiction) and poetry. As a child this editor looked forward to the mailman delivering (on alternate days) Colliers Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Life Magazine (which had photo essays of Picasso, Hemmingway and Robert Frost), Time and/or (if his parents were feeling wealthy) Newsweek (or U.S. News & World Report) as well as The Readers Digest, Harpers Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Geographic, Scientific American and a slew of others. A child growing up in the middle of the 20th century had no shortage of well curated reading material. We suspect that few could afford subscriptions to all these today. It would run into the hundreds of dollars a year, still, less than cable TV.
Only a few of those magazines are still around and the competition for literary works is fierce. A few years ago the fiction editor of the Atlantic said that he received almost 20,000 submissions for just 16 slots a year. The Paris Review “accidentally” deleted a slush pile going back several years. The Readers Digest if it has crawled its way out of bankruptcy now looks like any one of a dozen “women’s” magazines poised at the checkout counter in the hopes that you’ll buy it on impulse. Gone are the “boy and his dog” stories, instead, yet another “how to loose weight with the fill-in-the-blank diet.” How come no one ever looses weight on these diets and why do they seem to make the American reading public more dumb and lethargic?
This editor writes a lot. In his cubbard are a half dozen novels (in various state of disrepair) and almost a four dozen unpublished short stories. Last summer he wrote a “boy and his dog” story that, he though, might fit a national magazine, but where, which one? A visit to the library revealed that such a story no longer fit in anywhere so he reluctantly has published it here (That is what WHLR is for, after all): Pepper pulls a fast one.
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 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:
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.
For those of you interested in the classics we have:
We are glad to have reviews in by our stalwart reviewers like Irene Koronas, Dennis Daly and Zvi A. Sesling for the final edition of 2013. I also want to thank some of our other reviewers who review books for free and do it for the love of the literary arts. Folks like Lo Galluccio, Lawrence Kessenich, Pam Rosenblatt, Ralph Pennel, David Miller, Alice Weiss, Timothy Gager and so many other local writers who have graced these pages, as well as the environs of the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, making both these venues very special indeed..
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 eighth
anthology. You may purchase them here:
