Submissions
We want your art and your performances and your stories. Send us your story as an attachment to parleylit@gmail.com
(We are trying to get the Submittable thing going, but for now, it’s old school email.)
In the subject line of your email, write the word submission and then write the category.
For example - submission: radio play
See descriptions of categories below. See our about page to learn more about the magazine, our mission, and our aesthetic.
poetry
Send us up to 3 of your poems. You may include an audio recording of yourself reading them, but please be prepared to work with our editors as you may need to rerecord. We love editing almost as much as writing, and we are excited to work with you! If you do choose to send us prepared audio or video - You can make this recording as basic or as fancy as you’d like, but be sure that all the content you send us is yours.
Your poetry submission should be no more than 10 pages total.
graphic lit
Graphic lit can be almost anything that is both literary and visual. This can be a video like our graphic poems in issue one. It can include an audio component, but it does not have to. It can be two dimensional with or without video or audio. It can be a comic strip, a picture, a diagram of your mamaw’s kitchen.
This should be no more than 5-15 pages in length and/or 5-15 minutes of audio or video in total.
literary plays & radio plays
Literary plays or dialog-driven short stories/creative nonfiction should be approximately 5-10 double spaced pages in length. Please send them as a word attachment.
For our 2025 issues, we will be offering to cast and record short radio plays. Please make it clear which genre your play falls into in the body of your email.
performance
The performance category should engage at least two senses. It should be, in one way or another, audio and/or static visual and/or video-based. This work should be literary in nature in that there is a story. This can include music, monologues, dialog (submitted in collaboration with other creators with their full consent), animation, voice over, short films, short recorded plays, comedy performances, or any hybrid that inspires you. Please attach to your email submission.
audio documentary/ flash video documentary
Starting in issue 4, we will be publishing one audio/flash video documentary per issue. In this category, there are two options:
Your audio documentary can be up to 20 minutes in length and should be based on a true story. Think: creative nonfiction out loud. Think: family stories, stories from your town, stories from your homeland, stories that matter but aren’t in the news. If you include interviews or music in this, please ensure that you’ve gathered signed consent and that the participants are available to sign our standard literary magazine publishing contracts. Please email us with any questions.
Your video documentary should be ten minutes or less. All the same details apply. If a team works on this documentary, please CC all participants on your submission email.
pitches: totally biased reviews
If you’ve published a book in the last 10 or so years or you have one coming out soon, we’d love to hear from you. We believe that you are the expert on your own book, and our conversational reviews aim to give you the space to review yourself (plus - it will allow our readers to get to know you, your process, and your work a little bit more intimately.)
In the pitch, link your book and/or send us a summary. Tell us a little bit about what your book is doing/going to do in the world.
pitches: audio columns
In issue 4, we will be starting audio columns. Send us a pitch and topics for the first 6 episodes.
Tell us time standards (weekly? monthly? biweekly?) that you can realistically commit to. Columns will be published according to the author’s committed schedule, outside and alongside our issues.
Send us one example column as an attachment. Columns should be written and include an audio or video element.