Submission Guidelines
You need to know what we want, what we don’t want, and how to submit. What we want: Short work. We love a great idea expressed in a few lines. (One of our favorite examples of this economy of language is Alice Walker’s poem “Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.”) Fiction and other prose under 500 words. We have a short attention span. We can’t help it. It’s like a disability, we think. So here's the deal on the length of poems, which we have firmed up a bit as of September 2007.  To be short enough to be considered, your poem has to pass two length tests, which we call 2Length Tests (which is also the name of a hip-hop act out of Birmingham, Alabama.)   Test one:  Under 16 lines.  We'll go up to 20 lines if the word count is under 75 words. Test two:  Not more than 75 words.  Well go up to 100 words if it's 16 or under lines. In addition to our numbered issues, we do online chapbooks. However, these are by invitation only and we don’t take unsolicited submissions for these. What we don’t want: Please, no haiku. Or, as we might say in English with a heavy Japanese accent: haiku no haiku send in no five-seven-five good thing overdone Regarding these subjects: pets, alive pets, dead parents grandparents old photos stuff you find in the attic while visiting your grandparents’ house romantic love yourself With a couple of exceptions, I myself have written and even published poems on these topics. I LIKE pets, parents, grandparents, and romantic love. But these are overdone. If you send something about nature, we'll be particularly looking for a fresh approach. (We’re less likely to publish something about a natural object as we are something about a natural object embedded in somebody’s head.) We stay away from work that is quaint and sentimental. We like a bit of edge. We don’t like drama and we're not nuts about confessional. To try to allow our readers to access the journal in schools and places with content filters, we avoid publishing profanity, sexually explicit content, and graphic violence. (Unless it’s a natural object embedded in someone’s head.) We admit to being averse to traditional rhyme and meter, except for the subtle. (Our favorite kind of rhyme is the kind we don’t even notice, but is pointed out to us by the smart person sitting next to us.) Obvious rhyme and lock-step meter gives us seizures. (Not the grand mal kind. More the kind that make you kind of blank out and rub your nose.) In our format a line cannot contain more than about 55 characters. See, we did the math for you. We usually don’t like highly ecc entric use of line indentation and extra spa ces. How to Submit You might want to begin with checking our schedule of projects in preparation to get an idea of what issues we are reading for and estimated dates these issues are expected to appear. Check here. These are important: Email submissions to righthandpointing –at- gmail.com. (Obviously you have to make a little adjustment there.) For poetry, email 1-4 pieces.  For fiction, 1 or 2.  Please make sure you’ve checked them thoroughly for errors and you’ve arrived at a final form. Send in the body of the email if you can. If you want to attach a Word file, please include all pieces in one file and avoid any fancy formatting. Keep it simple. For art, send one or two samples and make an inquiry. Include a note to us in your email. Just say hi or something. We don’t like getting an email with poems in it that have no introductory note. This is a breach of good manners. So, we don't even read work that comes to us without a howdy. It helps to include the word “submission” in your subject line, and please do include your name in the subject line. So: “Submission / Dick Cheney” is just fine (if you’re Dick Cheney). Include a bio in the 3rd person. Check any issue of RHP to get an idea of format and length. This saves a step if we accept your work. You’ll get a chance to revise you bio if your work is accepted. Regarding simultaneous submissions. It’s okay to send us work that you’ve simultaneously sent to others, as long as you indicate it’s a simultaneous submission and you let us know promptly if some other deal takes your work before we do. We don’t read work that appears to have been sent in one email to several journals. We think this is tacky and, worse, it makes us feel cheap. We want to be treated special. With rare exceptions, we don’t accept previously published work. If you’ve published a poem on your own blog or something, that’s ok. E-mailable art is also welcome and encouraged. But, please take a look at several back issues on the web to get an idea of the kind of stuff we like. (For heaven’s sake, we’ve published art based on packages of batteries on this website.) Send jpg files of no more than 60K file size. If we turn down your work, please don’t send more work immediately. You know, “How about these?” We’ve been super busy lately. Please don’t be offended if it takes us awhile to get back to you. In return, we are not at all offended when someone writes and asks us if we’ve had a chance to look at their work yet. We don’t pay anything for published work. Sorry. We’d send a couple of free copies except, well, you know…. You can look at it as much as you want. We obtain First North American/ Worldwide Serial and/or Electronic Rights. All rights revert back to the author upon publication. (Frankly, we don’t really know what we means, but all the other editors say it). Sincerely, I appreciate your interest in Right Hand Pointing. As with all little literary enterprises, our authors are also our readers. We enjoy working with our authors and greatly appreciate their work and dedication to art. Dale Email submissions to righthandpointing –at- gmail.com.