General Submission Guidelines

All submissions should be the sole work of the author—we emphatically do not accept AI generated work, in whole or in part. We also do not accept previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, as long as work is withdrawn immediately upon its acceptance elsewhere. Please wait 6 months after having a piece published in The Long and the Short of It to submit again. Please do not send more than one submission of up to three short-form pieces and one long-form piece at a time. Wait until pieces are accepted or rejected to submit again. If submitting to both long- and short-forms, send each in a separate submission with a separate cover letter. These submissions do not need to be in the same genre. Once a piece has been submitted, we will not consider edits until the piece has been accepted. At this stage, we or the author may request minor adjustments, but not substantial revisions.

Please note that hybrid work is more than welcome--for the sake of our workflow, please submit it to the category that best fits the work, and include a note of how you see the form functioning in your cover letter.

The Long & The Short of It acquires first publishing rights. As such, submitted work must not be previously published. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please withdraw your piece immediately if accepted elsewhere. To partially withdraw short submissions, use the message function in Submittable. Copyright of all accepted submissions remains with the author.At this time there is no submission fee, and no honorarium. In the future we may charge a small submission fee to cover artist honorariums.

Creative Nonfiction and Fiction Submission Guidelines:

Short-form—500 carefully chosen words or less, not including the title or your bio.

Long-form—5,000-10,000 words. Slightly over 10,000 may be accepted if it is close, but if it’s much longer we may have to decline reading for the sake of time.

Creative Nonfiction - What We’re Looking For: Make me wish I was you, or thank the Universe that I’m not. I want to crawl into your skin, look through your eyes, savor with your tongue, without getting arrested. Your experience doesn’t have to be unusual or startling, though you should feel free to tell me about hang-gliding with llamas in Ukraine to fundraise for your little sister’s rare disease. I want to have something to talk with you about when we meet for coffee before our author signings at the National Book Festival (first one will be on me—don’t be late), and I want to feel like we’ve already been in conversation, even if it’s about baking cookies with your grandma. Put eyes somewhere that would shock a sculptor and stun me with that perspective. My email is longandshortlit@gmail.com.

Fiction - What we’re looking for: I am fed the boring, ordinary, and mundane; my bowl of cereal soggy and tasteless, my conscious an ouroboros, drowning in pages of formulaic storytelling. I am famished. Feed me something new; show me your fantasies and ground me through adversity. Highlight your imagination and take me on a journey through your world. Make me celebrate your protagonist’s victory and crush me with their heartbreak. Build this world how you see fit or show me a new world shaped by your unique perspective. Force me to reconcile with ordeals that are not my own and immerse my senses in a cornucopia of radiance. Leave an impression, make me think, change the formula, break the formula, leave me hungry for more while satisfying my famine. Send me your nourishment! My email is longandshortlit@gmail.com

Poetry Submission Guidlines:

Short-form—15 lines or less, not including stanza breaks, or 300 words or less for prose poems. All styles and traditions are welcome, but keep in mind the limitations of formatting posts on Substack. Left alignment is heavily preferred, with minimal indentation and internal spacing. For less traditional formatting, you may be asked to provide an image of your poem as a jpg or png if accepted.

Long-form—45 lines or more, not including stanza breaks, or 1,000 words or more for prose poems. All styles and traditions are welcome, but keep in mind the limitations of formatting posts on Substack. Left alignment is heavily preferred, with minimal indentation and internal spacing. We will not be able to accommodate long-form poetry with less traditional formatting by posting as an image.

Poetry - What We’re Looking For: A poem, by my definition, is a unit of surprise. I like a poem that jukes in its line breaks. A poem that’s breathless because it refuses to break. I like a poem with images that land in your lap like marble-sized meteors. A poem that has deadly voltage, but never quite closes the circuit. A poem that knows something you don’t and refuses to tell, or that shows up in your kitchen and spills every bean you have. A poem that was born conjoined to the theme and would die if separated. A poem that flirts with the theme just to get a free dinner. I like a poem that says it’s a twink on Grindr, but when it shows up is clearly a twunk. I’m only on Grindr at all because I feel lonely. I’m still in love with my ex, who has no interest in me. I want to be a slut, to prove to myself and him that I’m still desirable and capable of desire, to wake up in a man’s arms and tell him about the dream I was having, how I was strapped down in the trunk of a car barreling off a cliff, but the feeling of flying made the spare tire pressed against my cheek glow like a halo, and in response I want him to open up about how his mother’s passive aggressive disapproval of everything he did made him a desperate people-pleaser. I’ll tell him the only way to please me is to read me a poem. It’s your poem. His email is longandshortlit@gmail.com.