The best way to get an idea of what we publish is to carefully read the information under the “About Flycatcher” tab.
Please send your work to: flycatcherjournal [at] gmail [dot] com
Please note: We are no longer considering unsolicited submissions for Issue 2, which is due out this summer. Any unsolicited submissions that come in now will be considered for Issue 3, publication date and deadline for submissions TBA.
Visual art submissions: Special guidelines can be found at the bottom of this page, though please do read all guidelines on this page carefully, as many of them are applicable to writing as well as visual art.
For now, we plan to publish two times a year—in winter and summer—and will accept unsolicited submissions year-round on a rolling basis. If you miss the deadline for a given issue, your work will be considered for a subsequent issue. (Our year-round submission window is subject to change, so please refer back to this page if you plan to submit for issues beyond our first one.)
Please read the following guidelines carefully before submitting any work:
Flycatcher welcomes and encourages unsolicited, simultaneous submissions. Please notify us immediately (at the e-mail address above) if your work is accepted elsewhere.
Please attach your submission as a Word document (preferable) or paste it into the body of the e-mail if attaching a Word document is not possible. Please understand that we cannot accept and may not be able to respond to submissions that do not follow these guidelines.
We seek to feature unpublished and emerging writers and artists as well as established writers and artists, and everyone in between.
Flycatcher acquires first rights for publication. Upon publication, all rights revert back to the author. Should we make a print anthology at a later date and wish to include your work, we will always contact you regarding this for permission. We reserve the right to keep work that we’ve published available as archives on our website.
We accept most any writing form or artistic medium. We are not necessarily looking for genre fiction (romance, horror, mystery, etc.), motivational writing, overtly political writing, or purely academic writing, so please query first if you think your submission might fit into one of these categories. (A note on "overtly political": Certainly, some of the work we publish will have political implications, and some of it will reference politics, and some of it may well challenge or question politics. By "overtly political writing," we simply mean work that is inherently partisan, that reads like a campaign ad, etc.)
We welcome and encourage traditional writing forms (poems, creative essays, short fictions) as well as work that is harder to classify. We also accept book reviews (as well as reviews of other media) and interviews. We strongly recommend that you query first if you’d like to send us a review or an interview. We also welcome excerpts from nonfiction books, novels, etc. that can stand alone.
All work should be literary in nature and relate, in some way, to our philosophy (which can be read under the "About Flycatcher" tab). With that said, we are very open to and interested in your interpretations of our philosophy and we hope to find some unexpected, surprising, and creative connections (even distant connections) among your submissions, but we cannot seriously consider submissions that are completely unrelated to our publishing focus.
We do not have a word limit for any genre, though please try not to greatly exceed 5,000 words. 3,000 words or less is perhaps our ideal target. Please indicate word count on the first page of each prose submission.
Please double-space prose, single-space poems, and use a standard font.
In the body of your e-mail, please include a very short cover letter with previous publications, biographical information, etc. (And please do not worry at all if you don’t have any previous publications, as we are proud to feature unpublished talent.) Unfortunately, we can no longer consider work not accompanied by a cover letter.
Please include your name and your e-mail address on the first page of your submission, as well as in the body of your e-mail.
Please include the genre(s) and title(s) of your work in the subject line of your e-mail.
Please send no more than two submissions at a time (up to three poems and up to three images would count as one submission each). Please do not send any other submissions until you’ve heard back from us. Each submission does not require a separate e-mail, though please include individual submissions as separate attachments. (If you are pasting multiple submissions into the body of your e-mail, it needs to be very clear how many submissions are included and where each begins and ends; but again, we prefer work sent as Word attachments.)
We do not encourage unsolicited submissions of previously published material. We will only consider previously published material if the work in question is one piece among a group—a previously published poem among a group of unpublished poems, for example—and only then if the work in question contributes, with the previously unpublished pieces, to a greater theme or message. If you do submit previously published material that meets this criteria, indicate clearly where and when it was published in your cover letter and/or on top of the first page of your submission. We will always credit the original publication in the rare event that we do reprint previously published work. (Please note that previous publications include blogs, personal websites, and anywhere accessible to the general public. Please also note that "versions" and "updates" to previously published work fall under these guidelines.) Most of our reprints will be by invitation.
Please do not submit the only copy of your work, as we will not be able to return submissions.
Response times will vary depending on the length of the work you send, but it is our goal to respond to each submission within a month if at all possible. Sometimes the wait will be a matter of days and sometimes it will be closer to two months. Feel free to follow up if you haven’t heard from us in three months. Please be patient, as we are a small team of volunteers. Your work is important to us.
Flycatcher is not responsible for lost e-mails or technical difficulties, either on our end or yours. Again, please feel free to follow up if you haven’t heard from us in three months to make sure that we’ve received your work.
Again, to get a feel for whether or not your work is right for Flycatcher, please refer to the “About Flycatcher” tab.
Please write to us for questions, clarifications, and queries.
A note on payment: As a small team of volunteers, Flycatcher cannot offer payment for published work. We are not making any money from this publication and it is our mission to keep it free for our readers. With that said, we will be committed to the writers and artists we feature, in terms of providing a platform, an ongoing outlet, and various resources on writing and art. Rest assured that we will do our very best to promote and support you and your work. We could not do this without the kindness of contributors, and so you have our deepest gratitude.
Visual art submissions: Where applicable, all visual art submissions should follow the above guidelines. For visual art, we prefer submissions of low-resolution jpeg images, and we will contact you for final files if we would like to feature your work. In your cover letter, please include a brief (one paragraph) artist statement, with at least a sentence explaining how your work is a potential fit for Flycatcher. Please also make note of your work's medium and, if possible and pertinent, its original size. Our guidelines for previously published material are a little more relaxed for visual art, though do let us know if your work has been published elsewhere, even if on a personal website or online gallery. Please, however, do not send a link to a gallery as your submission.
Thank you for taking the time to read this information. We look forward to reading your work!
