Suss: another literary journal

You’d do well to poke around the site a bit, read­ing what we’ve pub­lished. This should stand as com­mon prac­tice when­ever you plan to send work any­where, but we thought we’d remind you. It would also help to read through these (or any) guide­lines in their entirety.

That said, we’ll add this: we have a wide range of inter­ests and find value in a great vari­ety of styles, schools, and voices. If the phrase hadn’t been overused to the point of mean­ing­less­ness, it would be appro­pri­ate here for us to high­light our eclec­tic tastes. Instead, we’ll say that we hold among our col­lected favorites the big names of what­ever canon the American read­ing pub­lic might want to agree on; the lesser names among post-avant poets and (post)postmodern fic­tion writ­ers; main­stream jour­nal­ists; clear headed aca­d­e­mics; fringe blog­gers; and so many more. We like genre mys­ter­ies and sci-fi as much as we like lit­er­ary fic­tion, long-dead high mod­ernist poets as much as recent prac­ti­tion­ers of flarf. Our tastes veer toward the acces­si­ble and the moving—we like laugh­ing as much as we like navel-gazing—though we’re not averse to what John Ashbery calls “some­thing with a cer­tain amount of crunch and resis­tance to it.” No mat­ter the genre, style, or man­ner of con­struc­tion, we are ulti­mately con­cerned with the qual­ity of writ­ing. A sub­jec­tive rubric, yes, but the only one we have. Additionally:

• We accept sub­mis­sions year-round.
• Simultaneous sub­mis­sions are encouraged.
• Previously pub­lished work is not accepted.
• All sub­mis­sions must be made through our online sub­mis­sion page.
• We can very likely read any file for­mat you can send us. We pre­fer .doc, .odt, .pdf, .rtf, and .html files, but feel free to send us what you’re most com­fort­able with. If we can’t open it, we’ll let you know.
• If you are sub­mit­ting more than one piece of work (ie, five poems or three short-shorts), please com­bine them into a sin­gle file.
• Name your file as fol­lows: [your last name].[genre you’re sub­mit­ting to].[file exten­sion]. For instance, if you are Frank O’Hara, are sub­mit­ting poetry, and write your work in MS Word, your file should be named “ohara.poetry.doc”. This helps us orga­nize sub­mis­sions more eas­ily and limit the num­ber of files lost in the shuf­fle or need­lessly duplicated.
• Really, please adhere to that nam­ing con­ven­tion for your files. Seventeen files a week named “poems.doc” or “suss.doc” helps no one and slows down our turn-around.
• We do our best to respond with our deci­sion within one month.
• Please limit sub­mis­sions within a sin­gle genre to one sub­mis­sion every three months.
• We are open to col­lab­o­ra­tive and co-written work. For the pur­poses of the sub­mis­sion man­ager, we sim­ply ask that you pro­vide the name and con­tact infor­ma­tion of only one author. Any addi­tional authors’ infor­ma­tion can be included in the sub­mit­ted file.
• If your work doesn’t clearly fit into our gen­res but you think its spirit is in line with ours, please send it any­way and let us fig­ure it out. This may include comics, short videos, col­lage work, text-heavy visual art, short plays, what have you. If you feel we’d be a good home, we’d like to take a look. Simply choose “other” from the drop-down genre menu when submitting.
• If your work is accepted, we can offer as pay­ment only our grat­i­tude and as much pub­lic­ity as we can muster for your causes going forward.

Please sub­mit 3-5 poems at a time. There are no length restric­tions; how­ever, keep in mind that your work will pri­mar­ily be read on a screen so choose what you send us accordingly.

Please sub­mit one long piece or up to five short pieces. We leave it to you to make the dis­tinc­tion. While there is no set max­i­mum length, we’ve found that any­thing over 5,000 words gets a bit cum­ber­some to read on a screen. Of course, if you’ve got the goods and it clocks in north of 5K—sure, we’ll take a look.

Please sub­mit one long piece or up to five short pieces. We leave it to you to make the dis­tinc­tion. While there is no set max­i­mum length, we’ve found that any­thing over 5,000 words gets a bit cum­ber­some to read on a screen. Of course, if you’ve got the goods and it clocks in north of 5K—sure, we’ll take a look.

The Learning Annex col­umn arose from an observed need for open source les­son plans for read­ing and writ­ing both in and out­side of the acad­emy. Structurally, we’re open—there is equal need for for­mal les­son plans, notes toward a lec­ture, writ­ing prompts, and rumi­na­tive per­sonal essays about the teach­ing expe­ri­ence. Length is vari­able, as is focus. A con­tri­bu­tion to the Learning Annex might tackle a broad discipline-wide topic, present a very nar­row writ­ing exer­cise, or talk about the use of a sin­gle work as a way in; it may be a few para­graphs or sev­eral thou­sand words. Ideally, it should be some­thing an author feels com­pelled to talk about and feels a broad audi­ence could take from and put into prac­tice. If we can answer any addi­tional ques­tions for you, please con­tact us.

Whether you have an idea for an inter­view sub­ject or have con­ducted an inter­view and think we may be a good home for it, please query us first. You will want to tell us why Suss would be a good home for the inter­view, if you would need us to arrange the inter­view, any addi­tional infor­ma­tion that might make it impos­si­ble for us to pass up the oppor­tu­nity, and all per­ti­nent con­tact information.

Book reviews are lim­ited to 250 words and a pri­mar­ily pos­i­tive slant. With so many options in the world, we see no rea­son to waste our time or yours telling peo­ple what not to read. We are open to reviews of recent pub­li­ca­tions or older pub­li­ca­tions that have since been wrong­fully for­got­ten or neglected. It is on the reviewer to prove that last point.

We typ­i­cally pre­fer to limit recent pub­li­ca­tions to those from small or inde­pen­dent presses. While we’re cer­tain Haruki Murakami’s next book will be spec­tac­u­lar, it won’t need the mea­ger pub­lic­ity Suss might bring to it. A new title from your favorite small press just might.

If you’d like us to review your book, please con­tact us. If you’d like to become a reg­u­lar reviewer, please send a request accom­pa­nied by what­ever you feel is appropriate.

Every month the col­lec­tive Suss body (includ­ing cur­rent authors, edi­tors, read­ers, etc.) point to some num­ber of things cur­rently inter­est­ing us (be it a book, a build­ing, the awe­some peony bush out­side their kitchen win­dow, an idea they par­tic­u­larly like...) and explain to us, in a sen­tence or two at most, why we should also spend some time with this thing of theirs. If you’ve got some thing cur­rently inter­est­ing you and think we and our audi­ence might also find it inter­est­ing, send us a mes­sage. Please limit your­self to a sen­tence or two at most in telling us why this thing of yours is so awe­some that we should all get right on it.