Creative Nonfiction—Compressed Prose (including creative nonfiction prose poetry)

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For fiction & creative nonfiction prose (and we think of the prose poem as such), we have a word-count limit: 600. Please be sure to submit in the correct category; we've been receiving several fiction submissions in the creative nonfiction category. This is the CREATIVE NONFICTION category. If you are writing PROSE POETRY that is also CREATIVE NONFICTION, then this is the category for you.


Here are a dozen things Matter Press definitely doesn’t want:  

  • conversations in bars, cafes, restaurants, cars, hikes, or in some unexplained space where disembodied voices think they are way more interesting and clever than they are
  • anything written “after.” Nothing in conversation with, inspired by, or an homage to a preceding poem, artwork, or other text.  Before is okay.
  • line break poetry or poetry written as prose with / between the lines where the line break would be 
  • Pieces “after” the action, so that the protagonist does nothing except moments of glancing, thinking, reflecting, noticing, sitting, wondering, brushing, dreaming…
  • odd names of characters like Friglep or Zueron or Noir or anything that isn’t a name
  • a strange writing pseudonym that is a bunch of senseless letters strung together
  • the heading on a piece that still has the name of the writing teacher, English teacher, professor—along with the name of the class
  • yeah, the world is awful, the president is awful, the climate is awful, ICE is awful. It’s all awful. We know. No need to tell us. We 100% get it.
  • second-person stories. You can send such a story to your other favorite literary magazines; you do not need to send it here.
  • pieces that assume we will automatically care about your piece because you wrote it. We won’t. The piece needs to make us care. And pretty quickly. There are 100s of pieces in the slush pile. We aren’t a writing workshop that has no choice but to read each piece carefully and closely and lovingly because everyone knows everyone. We have choices. Hundreds of them.
  • the appearance of Jesus, God, or any holy being 
  • any questions about the above


If you've been published by the journal previously, please wait a year to submit.
 

  1. Please do not include a cover letter as part of the manuscript document.
  2. Please include, as part of your cover letter on Submittable, a brief bio. Also, in the cover letter, let us know why you feel this piece works for a journal obsessed with "compression."
  3. Please no more than one submission of a single piece in each genre at a time. Please feel free to submit again after receiving a response, but please no more than 3 submissions per genre per reading period.
  4. Simultaneous submissions are fine with us, but please let us know if the submission has been accepted elsewhere. Failure to do will result in some facsimile of your face being put on the Matter dart board. And no one wants that.
  5. Please format prose to be singled-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, in a Microsoft Word document, with an extra space between each paragraph. We do not consider poetry with line breaks.
  6. If you've been previously published by The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, please wait a year before submitting again.


 

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