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 twenty seventh issue (Volume 7, no 3) 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 have just published their latest anthology).
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. The files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading
but 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.
There is a lot going on in our small corner of the Universe. If allowed it could easily overwhelm a writer who's main job is to introduce this issue. There's politics of course: There is a great todo over when our two candidates for state senate can get together for a debate, the gating factor being when the local Rotary club can use the High School auditorium. There is a school play on one possible date and a national debate has popped up on another and the janitor objects to working 7 days in one week. I can't say that I blame him. It'll happen though, one way or another, things do in small town America.
Another distraction is the sudden flurry of finished manuscripts in search of agents, a publisher or both. Yours truly has one, a novel, thoughtlessly written without benefit of agent or publisher, as if they were an afterthought. One hundred and thirty five query letters later, the rejections trickle in. Wilderness House Press has been discovered too and we hope not just as an act of authors desperation. A full dozen manuscripts lie hopefully in the slush pile awaiting editorial scrutiny. A quick survey reveals some good ones, some not so good. Several of our friends have manuscripts floating out in the ether as well, some represented, some not, some good, some ….
Then there is autumn, that season of color that usually trumps spring in New England even on a bad year. This is not a great year; a season long drought has left the sugar Maple trees shedding their leaves as soon as they turn yellow or red. A subdued year they are calling it. Brown is the dominant theme and coyotes, rabbits and deer alike are ready for a long cold, wet winter. Global warming has some unexpected consequences.
We start our essay section with a remarkable speech given by our friend
Professor Luke Salisbury on the ocasion of his retirement from
the English department at Bunker Hill Community College.
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 he 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.
We have a remarkable lineup of poets, enjoy. But first we have another remarkable translation (transduction?) of
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 seventh
anthology. You may purchase them here:
