Our nascent but well-established literary magazine is now open for submissions.
Please send us your bizarre and your strange—we want to see the kind of writing that drops our jaws and tingles our jingles. Show us your uncanniest fancies, your slipperiest slipstream, your fractured fairytales. (No song lyrics, please.)
We want to hear voices that shout from the highest peaks and gurgle from the depths of the darkest unknowns, and also the kind of deafening silence that tests the volume of the ever-beating confluence of ideas running through the eardrums of humanity.
But remember, this is a journal that is post-humanity.
Show us the humane made insane and the insane made inhumane.
To clarify: we want absurdist twists, black-hole turns, robots, lawless run-ins (nothing illegal, of course), and alternative histories that defy time, logic, and space (but no historical fiction, or science fiction containing actual science, please).
We want to see work that resists and embraces, that throws us into the heat of desire and leaves us breathless, dripping wet and tangled up in the bedsheets of your prose (no erotica); we want work that makes us stare at the sky for hours afterwards, contemplating the supernatural (no spirituality).
You may have heard at some point that all writing is an exploration of the human condition, but do not submit that here. This journal is completely non-conditional, no exceptions. A good rule to follow: if your story has anything to do with the concept of existence, i.e. birth, growth, emotion, aspiration, conflict, and/or mortality, then we’re probably not the right home for you. You may submit to us to know for sure, but think really hard before asking us to read what may or may not offend us in an unforgivable way.
On brand:
Impossibilities and no-win situations; clarity and myopic attention to underworlds or the world of frogs, artificial or not; anti-science pseudoscience; a wild variety of difficult mother figures; semicolons, fragments, fragments of fragments, fragments of fragments of fragments, and fragments of fragments of fragments of fragments.
If you can offer a final image or turn that breaks us into so many pieces we lunge our tongues in the far corners of our potato chip bags for bits of greasy dust, then you’re in.
Off-brand:
- Lists of any kind
- unless the list is a cross-genre hermit crab prose poem with embedded math equations OR it is an actual list re: Trader Joe’s, in which case please submit a box of dark chocolate peanut butter cups along with your work.
- Regional colloquiums or dialects
- exceptions made if the dialect unlocks a secret code that can be deciphered at the end of your piece.
- Story arcs that follow the hero’s journey or any other pattern in ancient or religious texts, myths, nature, algorithms, or airport maps listed in the back of in-flight magazines.
- Mysteries
- Crime fiction
- Speculative fiction
- Fantasy
- Sci-fi
- Surrealist
- Fabulist
- Realist
- Romance
- Any “true life” stories that feature conflicts or scenes related to:
- death
- past lives
- live birth
- (or rebirths—figurative or literal)
- fires
- clogged drains
- space craft
- known planets in any existing solar system or fictive universe
- any stories featuring horses or small children
- Full disclosure: Yes, we have published stories like these in the past but have since reached our limit.
- Remember, we want your weird. If your story resembles any person, place or thing that has ever existed in “real” life or in any known fictional universe, or takes the form of any existing literary genre, we’re probably not interested. Surprise us!
- Story where the “punchline” shifts the reader back to reality.
- Satire.
Reading period:
We do not accept untimely pieces that feel stale or “expired.” It could be one to six years before your piece is published. We are an all-volunteer staff, and our publication could cease publishing at any time, which is why you should not submit your writing anywhere else if you hope to see us survive. We read nonsensory, meaning your manuscript should be in a digital format OR be transmitted telepathically. We recommend a high-end studio for the best results, but if you do not have access to such a facility, you can use Submittable.
Please note that these guidelines are just that: guidelines. If your work is weirder than anyone could have ever imagined, we’ll make room for it. But if your work is less weird than anyone could have imagined, please apply to graduate school and try us again in ten years (minimum).
We look forward to reading your work!
Unfortunately, we are unable to pay writers at this time.
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Rumpus original art by Natalie Peeples.
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Submit your own funny writing to our Rumpus submission manager powered by Submittable. See first our Funny Women Submission Guidelines.
To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.
