What this is
A magazine for the load-bearing word.
The Submission Fetish is the magazine of The Means of Production — an independent press for literature that treats systems, bureaucratic, institutional, linguistic, as material to be cut into. We publish work that knows the form it's borrowing and means to break it.
We are not interested in the well-behaved sentence that arrives, nods, and leaves. We want the piece that channels something volatile through a structure rigid enough to hold it — and then lets the structure show the strain. If your work has ever been called too strange for the magazines and too literary for the strange, this is the right address.
What we read
All of it. Every register.
One open call, no genre gates. Send the thing that doesn't fit the other forms. If you have to invent a category for it, you're in the right place.
Fiction
up to 6,000 words
Short stories and the prose that won't sit still. We favor the institutional, the procedural, and the quietly catastrophic over the merely sad.
Poetry
up to 5 poems
Lyric, anti-lyric, found, erasure, the poem disguised as a form you have to fill out. Send the sequence if it travels as one.
Hybrid
no length given
Essay that becomes fiction, fiction that becomes manual, the document that performs itself. If it resists the dropdown menu, it belongs here.
Interactive & Web-Native
link or file
Work that lives in the browser — the fake interface, the playable text, the page that is also the structure. Send a link or a self-contained file.
The fine print, plainly
The terms of the ritual.
Open now. We read on a rolling basis and aim to respond within eight to ten weeks. If you haven't heard from us by then, write and ask — silence is an error on our end, not a verdict.
Free to submit. No fee, no tier, no premium queue. The press is the means of production, not a turnstile.
Encouraged. Send your work everywhere. Just tell us at once if it's placed, and we'll release it with our blessing.
One submission per form at a time. Wait for a reply before sending the next.
First publication rights only. Everything reverts to you on release. The word was always yours; we only set it loose.
None. We have no money — we're a press, not a patron. What we offer is the printing, the attention, and a place that takes the work as seriously as you do. We'd rather say so plainly than dress it up.
Send the work
Channel it through the press.
All submissions pass through The Submission Fetish — our portal for the ritual of sending out, and the magazine's only door. Read the full guidelines there, then feed it the work.
Enter The Submission FetishFree · Rolling · First rights only · No payment