Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 5: I got 99 Problems, but your Journal’s Mission Statement Ain’t One.

At Metaphorward, we strive to publish accomplished writers with emerging new voices together in a way that encourages new talent to develop while also making sure to publish enough Joyce Carol Oates reprints to make sure that people actually buy our journal.  This in turn allows us to buy staples, glue, dope, and a shared subscription to Writer's Market.  We are committed to bringing great, exclusive fiction to the masses so long as the masses do not number beyond about one thousand, maybe fifteen hundred, and all have internet connections and are not put off by condescending language, obscure allusions, and elusive innuendo. 

Read previous issues to get a feel for some of the things we like.  We publish an eclectic array of fiction, poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction, but not so eclectic that you can just send us anything.  We’re basically looking for one particular story, and if that story is yours then awesome.  Of course, we will not just come out and say what we’re looking for, because we want you to really impress us - knock us off our feet!

We take our vision seriously.  Our name is more than just a clever pun - Meta-forward.  Meta, like, you know, meta, like stuff that is about itself, but also about other things, or like over stuff, or whatever.  Forward, like progress, like as in progressive, so we can reject capitalism and go live in teepees, but also metaphor, but maybe not metaphor, since metaphors, like caused the holocaust or something?  I kind of skipped workshop the day we talked about it, but that's what everyone was saying - that metaphors caused the holocaust and poetry was a metaphor, so every time you write a poem a Nazi gets his wings. 

We want to see your best work, and only your best.  We expect all entries to be well-written, edited, revised, re-written, proofread, and re-written again.  We take the best because we are the best.  Metaphorward is not able to pay contributors at this time.

GUIDELINES:

Poetry – Submit up to five poems, none longer than 100 lines, and none shorter than a single syllable.  That single syllable can span up to 5 pages, and those 100 lines can be hand-written so as to fit on the head of a match.  Don’t send us poems that rhyme, or that have rhythm, or that could possibly be read as coherent sentences. 

Fiction – Submit up to three pieces of flash fiction, none longer than 500 words, or one story not to exceed 2000 words.  Flash fiction should be obnoxiously twee and do something clever like end on a zingy one-liner, or have your characters be aware of their narrative situationality,  or occurring in the second person.  We do ask that you not submit any genre fiction, so no science fiction, fantasy, or horror since people actually read that stuff.  We mostly want stories about people who are basically okay with their lives who have one or two little things happen to them, and then they figure out how to be okay with it – stuff like not realizing their dreams, or having to struggle with some facet of white upper middle class identity that makes them uncomfortable.  We also like stories about brown people if there is rape, incest, or murder involved – you know, the kind of stuff that shows how gritty it is to be a brown person. 


Creative Non Fiction – You have to be important and interesting before you can be the subject of creative non-fiction.  Just because you lost your virginity to your cousin doesn’t mean you’re interesting.  If you lost your virginity to your cousin at the battle of Agincourt, then you have a story. 

Essays – Metaphorward is always accepting essays on a broad range of topics including art, fashion, trends in fiction, Sociology 232, Asian Studies 316, and Econ 101.

Photography - Please send your picture of a poor black man on a Mississippi stoop, a beer can on a train track, rusting playground equipment, flowers in the rain, an abandoned car on the road side, or an overturned wheelbarrow to our photography editor.

We take our commitment to new talent seriously – so seriously that we arbitrarily pick ten stories at random every month, give them a cursory proofreading to make sure they’re not actually psycho Nazi hate lit or an advertisement for Canadian Cialis, and then we have undergraduate interns slap these slush submissions somewhere in the back, after the photographs, and before the advertisements for Canadian Cialis.

Don't be afraid to send us new, experimental fiction so long as it's easily comparable to something else, like Hemingway in space - well no, we already said no genre fiction, so Hemingway if Hemingway lived in Manhattan and worked for an ad agency and drove a hatchback.  Or if Hemingway was a self-absorbed anorexic who wore girls jeans and wrote Power Puff Girls slash fiction.  But don't send us the slash fiction, send us Hemingway.  But, like, experimental Hemingway.  But experimental Hemingway for now, but for then.  Dear god, where oh where is Hemingway when we need him?

Our responses take about 2-6 months to process, so please be patient.  If you haven't heard from us in six months, we've already graduated and left the journal to our now-undergraduate interns, so it's their problem and not mine. Realistically, we've got a backlog of about two hundred people we owe favors to, so the only way we're printing you is if you give us money or our professors tell us to.

Best of luck,

Vytautas Malesh
Editor-in-Chief
Metaphorward - the College University College of Arts and Letters' Literary Journal