Welcome, wonderful writers!
- From May 1 until August 31, regular submissions will be closed.
- Tip jar submissions will remain open during the summer hiatus.
- All submissions received before May 1 are under consideration as usual.
- Special issue and This Modern Writer submissions will remain open according to their guidelines.
For all book review queries, please contact our reviews editor, Amye Archer, at amye@pankmagazine.com.
Email and snail mail submissions are never accepted. We use Submittable to manage all submissions to [PANK]. We apologize if this presents an inconvenience, but it's the only way we can responsibly manage all of the thousands of submissions we receive every year. All currently open submission categories are detailed below.
All manuscripts submitted to [PANK] must be original and previously unpublished and will be considered for both print and online publication.
We sometimes provide feedback on submissions when we think our insight might be useful to a writer, nothing more. Please remain calm if you receive it, likewise if you don't.
Submissions containing more than one poem or piece of prose must be submitted in the same file. Accepted file types are listed below.
Tip jar submissions for the regular magazine are optional, but encouraged. See below for details.
Regular Magazine Submissions: Tip Jar - $3.00
When you submit your work to [PANK], you may choose to "tip" us $3. It's entirely optional, doesn't entitle you to any special treatment, and we don't think any less of your submission if you choose to submit for free instead. It is merely one small way in which writers can help support the magazine's continued operation and publication.
We repeat, writers are always welcome to submit free of charge.
Beyond this, [PANK] wants to read what you want to share and thanks you for your generous support.
This Modern Writer
For This Modern Writer, we’re looking for essays about writers that extend beyond writing. Tell us something interesting about yourself or how you see the world. These essays are published on the popular PANK blog. If you've got something, send it our way.
Special Issue: Pulp
Pulp is story. Plot. Forward progression. Uncut and unabashed entertainment. For the Pulp Special Issue, tell me a story. Sex and high adventure, fun and guns, splatter and solemnity. Or any other category you can come up with. As long as it arrives in the form of a story.
It is perhaps axiomatic that there exist a finite number of plot lines, that every story that can be told, has been told. Pulp shrugs at this supposition, then casts an unflinching spotlight upon the shades of human endeavor in action, aka The Moment: the grace under pressure, the cowardice. What to do when the cement shoes are being poured? When the aliens have landed? When bad men are at the door and your children ask, Mom, what do we do? When you stand at the edge of a moiling dusty plain with no clue as to its extent, a bounty on your head, a half-empty canteen, four shells remaining? Pulp reworks cliche and controverts convention to emerge, often badly scathed, with a story that somehow we have never heard before. Therein lies the pleasure and the plain fun.
Let us be clear, however: pulp provides no haven for poor writing. Your sentences that smoke out stunning action need to be wrought in the finest of writing steel. If a story confuses, this ought to be an intended subterfuge, not the result of a badly drawn sketch.
Genre: yes, please. Crime, science fiction, fantasy, literary, whatever. I am partial to the hardboiled, the intellectual, the noir, the hilarious, the fantastical, and the hardcore, but am ready to be rocked by any story that sings. I don't believe there is such a thing as a trivial detail. Remember what the master storyteller Chekhov said, though - if there's a pistol on the wall in the first act, by the next one it better go off.
Some advice: avoid the laconic beginning. String me out from the very first sentence. Navels welcome, provided they are not too intently gazed upon. Oddity is good, kink is better. Closure not required, but narrative is. Be original. Be ambitious. Make every line pop. My restless eyeballs are always looking for escape. Keep them corralled.
Submissions will be open until 7/1.
This issue will be guest edited by Court Merrigan.