Submissions

Yellow Medicine Review is accepting poetry, fiction, and creative essays for its upcoming issue devoted to the modern writers working in the myth/folktale genre.

We live in a world where nothing surprises us anymore. It is a world of spectacle where anything you can dream of is available at a push of a button, just a simple click away. And yet, what seems to be a world of miracles is more and more lacking in magic, in that true and spontaneous sense of wonder that we felt once, long ago when as children we still believed in fairy-tales. How do we reclaim that forgotten magic? How do we see again the world through new eyes that have the power to imagine, shape, and kindle our curiosity? How do we make sense of a world where such notions are threatened by the ubiquity of information and answers to any mystery are seemingly a flicker of the screen away?

The role of fairy-tales, folk-tales, and myths has always been to explain the unexplainable and to open the door to the treasury of our imagination. They still play that role today. Maybe more so than ever, we need new myths, new tales that help us to recapture the fantastic moment in the routine of everyday life. We welcome creative works that rediscover the magic through the use of fairy-tale and mythical motifs, images, fantastic events and descriptions.

We are not looking for stories and fairy-tales written for children: rather, we would like to see writing that appeals to broader audiences, while playing with fairy-tale motifs and aesthetics and tapping into the oral traditions of indigenous communities. Such works can blend the magic and the real, take a modern twist on a classic tale, or revisit the rich heritage of half-forgotten folk legends. Think Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami, Marina Warner, Kate Bernheimer, and Nail Gaiman, among others. We are especially interested in multi-national submissions across marginalized cultures and ethnicities. Please send your best work. Translations are accepted if you can provide the original and the translation and you hold all rights to the work and its distribution.

Deadline: March 1, 2013

Publication: May 2013
Submission format:
Please send work in electronic files as a Word or rtf attachment to editor@yellowmedicinereview.com.
Please name your file with your name and YMR.doc following this example: YourNameYMR.doc.
A brief (around four sentences) author's statement (with name, where you are from, what you would most like readers to know about you) is also required along with submission.
It is also helpful to include your contact information (email and physical mailing address).
Please put in the subject line of the email, YMR Spring 13 Last Name (for example: YMR Spring 13 Wilson).