Rock Salt Journal publishes stories that people want to read. We're a New England Literary Journal; we lean hard on our roots. That means prose that reminds us of home. Burning Christmas trees beside the ocean, hiking accidents, boating accidents, opioid accidents, drunken tourists, and superstitious old timers. Long summer days, longer winter nights, snow falling on an old deer skeleton.
We're genre and form-agnostic, always hunting for quality fiction, nonfiction, poetry, humor, and visual art. To us, "literary" means emotional. It doesn't mean your characters have to be fully human; it certainly doesn't mean they have to be living. Stories that scare us or make us weep are likely to be published. The worst thing a story can be is boring. The best thing a story can do is impress a feeling. Previously unpublished authors and artists are encouraged to submit. We'd love to be the team to discover your talents.
We have two submission periods per year, December 1 to January 31 and June 1 to July 31. During those periods, please upload your submissions as doc or docx attachments (not pdf) in standard manuscript format (see example here) to rocksaltjournal.submittable.com or send an email to rocksaltjournal@gmail.com. Include the genre of the work in the file title (fiction, nonfiction, mixed media, or visual art). For visual art submissions, we accept pngs only, landscape or portrait. We will try to read and respond to every submission within three months, though probably sooner as reading your work is the fun part here. We accept and encourage simultaneous submissions. If your writing is accepted elsewhere, just let us know.
If accepted, your work will appear in digital and print issues. For now, we cannot pay our contributors, but we are not profiting either. We have a rolling deadline, so we accept and reject as we go until we have enough material for our first issue. We reserve Electronic Archival rights, but all other rights revert to individual contributors upon publication. Thank you for your patience.
For more information, see our interview with Jim Harrington on his “Six Questions For…” blog: https://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.com/2021/10/Rock-Salt-Journal.html