Original Poem

Abandon the Heart: Submitting to Literary Publications

Choosing which publications to submit work to is not always easy for writers.

Like most writers do, I submit to literary magazines every so often to keep things interesting and become a bit more visible in the literary world. Sometimes I focus on flash fiction, sometimes short stories and sometimes poetry depending on the mood I’m in.

Given the thousands or even tens of thousands of publications out there, I’ve been asked by several people how I select those that I submit to. To give you an idea of my approach here are some of the things I consider.

First off, I only submit when there is no fee involved, and ideally if there is at least a small payment offered. given how many pieces the typical writer submits a year compared to how many are accepted, for most of us it turns out to be a lot of submissions with few acceptances, and viewer paid acceptances. There are plenty of options out there where you can submit without a fee and so I don’t feel the need to pay to do so.

I prefer the call to have a deadline associated with it, ideally one within the next week or two. When I have too much time to work on something I often get lost in the details and make it far too complex, to the point I may not finish it. Deadlines motivate me and help me focus on the task at hand. It’s also been my experience that when there is no deadline, sometimes submissions seem to fall through the cracks and are never reviewed or responded to.

Another thing that’s important to me is that I the guidelines are clear and that whenever possible, some of the work they’ve previously published is available to read for free. What I have found many times is that the guidelines for submissions are not clearly stated and it isn’t possible to read what they’ve published in the past without buying a subscription.

When the call says something like, “We just want the best work possible,” I pass it by. I think it’s largely a waste of time to submit when you have no idea if what you write might be the least bit interesting to the editors, what type of poetry, of hundreds of possibilities, they focus on, whether there are certain topics they prefer over others, whether they want or accept free verse, formal verse, rhyming etc. or any number of other variables that may influence what they take.

It’s important to me to know if what a publication publishes is way out of my league or if I might have a shot at having my work accepted. In the case of themed submissions it also helps me get a feel for how others who were published responded to different prompts as well as how much interpretation you can do in regards to the theme.

I rarely answer calls that don’t have prompts or themes. Part of this is again to have a feel for what they are looking for as opposed to just submitting anything. But another reason is that I often have difficulty coming up with ideas for my work, especially when I have no starting place or direction. Themed calls give me a jumping off point and triggers possibilities as to how I might interpret the theme or prompt.

For this poem, the theme was abandoned places. Thinking about interpreting this idea, I wondered about the nature of abandonment and whether a place had to be a physical location or if it could also represent something more abstract.

I didn’t realize that the call I saw was on Submittable and not the main website, which usually lacks the complete details for the purpose of brevity. (Submittable is a submission manager that many publications use as well as a searchable submission database for writers). Unfortunately, it turned out that submissions were only accepted from those who currently live in Japan which I do not. So, I have decided to share it here. It began as a much longer poem which I reworked until it said what I wanted it to in a more concise manner.

Abandon the Heart

The war ended The day he decided to stop fighting There’s no such thing as a bulletproof vest Against some weapons Surrender should have brought relief Allowed belonging But what has never been accepted Also cannot be abandoned Abandonment more a condition of being Than definable moment So the apathy of status quo continued As if the war had never come and gone unrecognized Holding his wounds tight against him Noticing how no one noticed He couldn’t help but wonder - If the unseen war was truly over Why did he still hurt so much?

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had her poetry featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost. Her fiction has been published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found on Amazon under her pen name, Taye Carrol.

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You can find links to all of the articles, stories, fiction and poetry I publish on Medium here. Thanks for reading!