JEAN SALAD submissions!

this hopeless lit mag needs you!

We’re here! Our jeans have a huge, gaping submission hole in them, and we need you to take a look! And are we asking for submissions for the second issue of JEAN SALAD before the first one’s even out? Well… yes! YES WE ARE! How’s that for efficiency :)
And not just for the second issue either, submissions are open from now until we say they aren’t so you’d better get to writing!

And if you’re a bit skeptical and thinking to yourself hmm, I’d like to see how this first one turns out before submitting my precious work, we get it, and good news, it’s out in 10 days!!

So, who are we?

We’re JEAN SALAD, of course! Perhaps you mean what? Like, what are we?
Because what we are is a primarily Substack-based, salad-adjacent cult cosplaying a lit. mag whose mission is to take over the dare I say it, rather boring and sterile world of lit-magification (not all, mainly the paris review) one bad poem at a time! We aim to be a space where young, underrepresented writers (or old and cool) from all over the world are given a voice, a community, and a platform to showcase their talents. So, if that sounds like you, get those jeans on, sharpen your pencils and send us your best work!

We’ll never use the word masthead or call ourselves editors-in-chief, but the JEAN TEAM will be making themselves known to you guys ever so soon, we’re all just a little shy :)

What do we want?

• a complimentary, unlimited and very tasty salad bar to show up at our office every lunchtime, please get in touch if you can make this happen

• a teeny tiny bit of world domination

What do we really want?

POETRY!

ALL GENRES, ALL FORMS, ALL LENGTHS (experimental, weird and/or bad very much encouraged)
*Up to six poems at a time

FICTION

ALL FORMS, ALL GENRES, I GUESS TECHNICALLY ALL LENGTHS, BUT KEEP IN MIND THE CURRENT EPIDEMIC OF THE TIKTOK ATTENTION SPAN AND MAYBE KEEP IT BELOW 1500 WORDS
*Up to one fiction piece at a time

STANDALONES (LONGER FICTION & ESSAYS & MORE)

WE’LL TRY NOT TO CONFUSE YOU, BUT ALONGSIDE THE SEMI-REGULAR MAG, WE’D LOVE TO PUBLISH GREAT PIECES ALL YEAR ROUND! SO, IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT MIGHT NOT BE SUITED FOR A POETRY AND SHORT STORY MAGAZINE BUT IT’S BEAUTIFULLY GOOD AND NEEDS A HOME, WE’LL MORE THAN CONSIDER IT! THIS COULD BE:

longer fiction pieces 1500+ words, Personal, cultural, anything essays (doesn’t have to be fully formed, have an outline? a great concept or title? we’ll take it), photography, artwork, political commentary, comics, podcast ideas, your favourite salad recipe?? anything you can think of!

How to Submit?

Preferably on all fours, and to litrachuh@gmail.com

Don’t worry about formatting, word/google doc or pdf encouraged but not mandatory, poem in the body of an email? Sure! short story in comic sans on a neon green background? Fine with us! no pretensions over here, but if you could try and make it as easy for us as possible it would be greatly appreciated and it’ll mean we’ll have more time to read all of your submissions.

Cover letters aren’t necessary, but we’d love to hear about you and your story so feel free, at least tell us where in the world you’re from!

Please allow up to 8 weeks for us to get back to you, though probably much quicker than that.

The Important Boring Stuff

• Right now, we can’t pay. Well we can, we’re just choosing not to! Kidding, of course, we really can’t :(
  When the day comes and a really generous, sweetheart of a billionaire decides to pump lots of money into our hopeless lit mag, we promise we got you! We also of course are not charging a submission fee! If however, any of you want to slip a dollar into the back pocket of our jeans to try and get your work to the top of the pile, we may or may not be ok with that! Kidding again, I mean we do have a ko-fi and although we discourage you donating, it would be greatly appreciated and everything will go directly towards making JEAN SALAD the best it can be for all of us! Paid subscriptions also opening up in conjunction with the release of issue one, and that’ll come with lots of cool benefits! Donations will have zero impact on whether your work is or isn’t chosen!

• Writers retain all rights to their piece with the one time rights to publish the piece in our mag. If you’ve submitted your piece somewhere else, firstly how dare you, but that’s ok, just let us know if it’s being published.

• Pardon my language, BUT NO FUCKING AI. We’ll sniff it out, I’m serious. No plagiarism either, you’ll be instantly rejected and publicly shamed.

• And we shouldn’t have to say this, we know you guys are the best, but anything hateful, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, directly targeted at harming any particular marginalised group will be spat on and shredded! Good vibes only :)

• If your piece isn’t selected, we’ll do our best to give you specific and individual feedback, I doubt it’ll ever be down to the quality of your work, so if we feel it doesn’t quite fit into the issue we’re currently working on but may work in a future issue down the line, we’ll let you know.

I think that’s all for now, I’ll update this whenever new lore drops, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask us any questions here on the stack or in an email. Or just say hi :)

Oh and before we go we’d like your help! Which of these logos looks the coolest, cleanest and screams we mean business? Like gay and cute, but also business!