BY LISA MARIE BASILE
Luna Luna has been around for about eight years now, so I thought I’d share some tips on how to get published with us. I’ve also had countless conversations with writers who feel unwelcome in the literary world, or who aren’t sure how to break into a lit magazine. Here are some things I hope you’ll keep in mind. PS: Our submissions are currently open!
Be yourself.
We want your most subterranean voice, the music that no one gets to hear. We want your weird, gritty, honest voice. We want your hard stories. We want the whole sea in your poetry. We want your lush and gilded. We want the work that ignores, devours, and experiments with genre. We want your rage and refusal. We want the work that heals and opens wounds and questions everything. We want you to send us the work that other magazines have turned down — if you deeply believe in it. We want you to ignore what is popular, what sounds like homogenized academic stuff, what looks like, ‘the kind of poetry that people like on Instagram.’ Just be you. We’re not looking to fill our proverbial pages with the same voices, the same styles, or the same topics.
Don’t just send us ‘witchy’ stuff. Seriously.
It’s true that we dedicate a portion of the site to ritual, folk magic, and spell-poetry, but that doesn’t mean we only want you to submit poetry about magic (not that some of it isn’t amazing). But we are also very much a literary space and we make space for all sorts of writing. Over the past eight years, we’ve published incredible novelists, award-winning poets, emerging essayists, and the authors of your favorite books We’re interested in unique, brave, experimental, well-written literature. So, if you have a poem about the moon, it better be fucking good. In short, we contain multitudes — just like our writers and readers.
Don’t worry if you’re new to writing.
We love new writers, we encourage new writers to submit to us, and we don’t judge you ANY differently if your author bio shows a single publication versus bylines in every fancy magazine. Seriously, the work is what matters to us. That said, do include a bio — even if you simply want to share your literary inspirations and interests, versus your literary accomplishments.
Get to know us in our Facebook group, The Luminous.
Get a sense for our community, our interests, our readers, and our conversations. This is a great place to workshop ideas, meet new friends, and ask questions about writing or poetry. Join us here.
Read the site.
Spend a few moments going through the site. Understand what we value (identity, the literary, culture and race, community, chronic illness and disability, mental health, the literary), and take note of our aesthetics. Maybe you see something missing. Maybe you see a voice that isn’t represented. If you think it’ll work for us, send it. But your SEO content about gambling? Your essay on men’s rights? Your poem glorifying some awful, heinous crime or ideology? Cheesy song lyrics? Racist or sexist bullshit? Not for us. You will notice we encourage marginalized voices; we specifically welcome BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and foster youth voices. This is very important to us; if that’s important to you, too, submit to us!
Lastly, read the Submit page. All of it.
First, you’ll want to read our ‘Submit’ page. Seems obvious, right? Well, everyone’s at a different stage in their careers and Luna Luna is proud to work with emerging writers who are exploring the literary landscape for the first time. (Not to mention, many people do disregard the submission information).
On the submit page, you’ll find everything you need to know about rights (you keep ‘em), payment (we cannot pay, unfortunately), and simultaneous submissions (we encourage them!). There’s a lot more to it, though. When you submit your work to us — or any magazine — following the guidelines on document formatting and what kind of bio (or not) to include is key.
Magazine staffs are usually small, and their editors work full-time jobs, write themselves, and have little time — so it is super helpful to receive submissions that follow the guidelines. For example, a lot of people send questions about submissions to our personal Instagram or Twitter DMs; while we understand the nature of social media (we’re all ‘available’ — except, no, we are not), those questions can be answered on our site (and our submission page asks that people specifically not do that).