Submissions
How to Submit:
General Submissions for our June 2026 issue will be closed April 30th.
Themed Submissions for our August 2026 issue, “Hoopla,” will be open from May 1st to June 30th.
All submissions are accepted through our external submissions manager, Submittable. Please submit your piece under the appropriate genre form: poetry, fiction, or CNF. We welcome and encourage hybrid pieces! However, for the sake of our workflow, choose the genre that you feel best represents the piece, and leave a note in your cover letter about how you see the piece functioning. Write a cover letter that includes the title of the piece, word count or line count as applicable, and a brief third person biographical statement. Feel free to let us know how you heard about The Long and Short of It!
Please carefully check word count guidelines listed below for each genre.
General Submission Guidelines
All submissions should be sent through Submittable, and must 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 Simultaneous submissions are welcome, as long as work is withdrawn immediately upon its acceptance elsewhere. To partially withdraw one or more short submissions from a group, use the message function in Submittable. 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 short-form and one long-form piece at a time. Wait until pieces are accepted or rejected to submit again. 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.
The Long & The Short of It acquires first publishing rights. 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.
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!
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.