Send all submissions to: lostkeysmagazine@gmail.com
Indicate the genre (fiction/poetry/reviews) you're submitting to in the subject line. Attachments are preferred, but if need be you can submit your work in the body of the e-mail.
Deadline: To be considered for the inaugural issue submit by December 1, 2010
Simultaneous submissions are welcomed, but let us know immediately if your work has been accepted elsewhere. We do not accept previously published material. We ask for First North America Serial Rights (one-time right to publish first in the North American market) and permission to archive the work for six months on our website. After the six month archival period you may ask for the work to be removed.
All contributors will receive two complimentary issues of the magazine.
Fiction
We love dark humor and satire, but also appreciate the absurd and tragic. We really love tragically satiric dark humored absurdist fictions, but we will consider any fiction crafted by an exquisite imagination. Some of our favorite writers include Flannery O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Lydia Davis. If you dig their work, we'll probably dig your work. Or not. Either way, we'll let you know.
Send one 2,500 word (or less) story, or up to three stories totaling 2,500 words (or less) per issue.
Poetry
...is a pause for the masses, a place to collect, to meet, to gain new insights and connect with an audience of readers and writers. We are looking for work that explores modern day issues and gives every day people a place to reflect over their world. Hybrid, traditional, and experimental texts are welcome - what is important is that you feel your work has a place in the larger world and is able to fuel debate.
A few of the artists we love who have come before us: Anna Akhmatova, Keith Ratzlaff, Alice Notley, Amiri Baraka, Maureen Owen, and Charles Bukowski.
We will consider 1-5 pages of your poetry per issue.
Reviews
Subjective guidelines on how to be subjective
In his poem, "So you want to be a writer?" Bukowski said that "unless it comes out of/ your soul like a rocket,/ unless being still would/ drive you to madness or/suicide or murder, don't do it./ unless the sun inside you is/ burning your gut,/ don't do it./ when it is truly time,/ and if you have been chosen,/ it will do it by/ itself and it will keep on doing it/ until you die or it dies in you./ there is no other way/ and there never was." He also said "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire."
That is the best way to describe what we at lost keys are looking for. Reviews should be no less interesting or creative than the sound of aching heart strings (poetry) or its red headed step sibling (fiction). Reviews will be accepted on any subject from film and books to restaurants and albums. We like surprises. We also like to be entertained. We are asking for your pop culture excrement.
Send us one 750 word (or less) review per issue.
EDITORS
Fiction
SaraBeth Swain is a graduate of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and founder of lost keys magazine. She enjoys the whiskey tongued hymns of Ryan Adams, discovering new vices, and the Oxford comma.
Reviews
Dominique Vargas is an apron wearing, tattooed, pierced, Donna Reed loving, passionate, cynical, Heathcliff obsessed, Guinness drinking, cigar smoking, flask carrying, Southern writer. She dabbles in poetry but is addicted to prose.
Poetry
Jessey Nickells is a recent graduate of The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. Her thesis focused on the evolution of cannibalism in the Little Red Riding Hood tale. Hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, she hopes to one day be invited on a squidding expedition.
