To submit, simply attach one short story, saved as an MS Word document, to an email and send it to:
doric.literary@gmail.com
No cover letter is required* but be sure to include your story’s title, a word count, publication ready bio, and your social media handles in the body of the email.
Report your submissions: Chill Subs / Duotrope / The Submission Grinder
GUIDELINES
We accept classically inspired short stories of 1,000 to 8,000** words. We want to be the venue for those harder to place, longer works of fiction. Please submit one story at a time and wait at least two weeks after receiving a response before making another submission.
By “classically inspired” we mean that the more it reads like something from Flannery O’Connor or Katherine Mansfield, the better. Contemporary settings are fine: think of stories like “Peach Cobler” by Deesha Philyaw or “Sexy Motherfucker’s Mom” by Maureen Langloss.
We will never publish anything that promotes hate in any form, including racism, misogyny, sexism, homophobia, violence, ableism, transphobia, etc.
Stories involving guns, excessive drug use, or post-apocalyptic settings are unlikely to catch our interest. We’re not fond of re-imagined fairy-tales, pieces that end with a punch line, and we cringe at the mention of American Presidents or COVID. Directly quoting song lyrics also earns a hard pass.
This is a two-person operation, so sending a manuscript that is clear, polished, and as close to publication ready as possible will greatly improve your odds of acceptance.
SIM SUBS: Simultaneous submissions are fine and we trust you to let us know if your piece has been accepted elsewhere.
REPRINTS: Reprints are also fine as long as you own the rights and your submission does not currently appear, for free, elsewhere on the internet.
PAYMENT: Submissions are free. Although we do not pay for reprints, we offer a tiny honourarium (currently $10.00 USD / $14.00 CAD / £7.50 GBP) to writers for each piece originally published on this website. This payment can only be made via PayPal.
RIGHTS: We ask only for First Serial Rights, along with non-exclusive Electronic Archival Rights to showcase your work for the duration of the Doric Literary website. If you republish the work elsewhere, please credit us as the original publisher.
EDITS: Works that have been accepted for publication are edited in direct communication with the authors.
HOUSE STYLE: We cater to an international audience and accept whatever grammatical style each author prefers. You may find words on this website spelled with a superfluous “u”, or a “z” where you might expect an “s”, quotation marks may be double or single, regional dialects or colloquial expressions are fine with us. Don’t like the Oxford comma? No problem (You’re wrong but we’ll humour you). All we ask of writers is that the style remains consistent throughout their submission.
NOVEL EXCERPTS: We will consider novel excerpts, or chapters, provided they are within the word count listed above. Any excerpt must be able to stand alone and leave the reader feeling they have read a complete story.
LINKED FLASH PIECES OR MICROS: We’ll also consider submissions consisting of a series of flash fiction stories, or microfictions, provided that they clearly tell one unified story, add up to more than 1,000 words (and less than 8,000), and can be referred to by a single title. (Here’s an example from our editor: https://moonparkreview.com/issue-seventeen-fall-2021/frightened-animals/)
QUERIES: We pride ourselves on a fast response time. Really, really fast. Please query if you do not get a response after two weeks.
PLAGIARISM & AI: No. No. No. No! We’ll decline any work that is not your own – if we catch it. We also reserve the right to remove your submission from our website if we discover, after publishing, that your work does not contain your own heart and soul.
* Seriously, you don’t have to write a cover letter. In fact, we’d prefer if you didn’t. As long as all the details are in the email, we are happy. Here’s an example:
** We’re not uptight about word count. If your story is 8,008 words, there is no need to go through and delete eight adverbs. (But if those eight adverbs don’t need to be there in the first place, then maybe your work isn’t as polished as we’d like it to be . . .) On the other hand, if you send us a 997 word flash fiction piece, and it is brilliant, we’d be happy to publish it.
Doric Literary 