Eyeshot is internationally accessible. Fiction, photographs,
rants, reviews, links, essays, and other unclassifiables are accepted and
declined. We pay in dissemination and validation, however meager.
Eyeshot does not accept electronic (ie, e-mailed) submissions.
We do not use that damned Submissions Manager or Submishmasochism or whatever
it's called. Although we admire the ease of electronic submissions when
submitting things elsewhere, for Eyeshot's purposes, we prefer to make
things much more difficult for prospective contributors, in part because
in recent years we've felt that contributors have had no idea what Eyeshot's
usually posted and were just sending scattershot submissions to sites listed
on the devil's own Duotrope.
Thus: if you would like to contribute to Eyeshot, send a postcard
with as much of the story as possible semi-neatly handwritten on it.
Do not include any biographical information or previous publications or
the name of the prestigious NYC MFA program you're about to graduate from
+$80K in debt, or how many times you've been nominated for a Pushcart.
Just your e-mail address and as much of the story as possible. If you'd
like to send three numbered postcards with three postcards' worth of story,
that's cool. Please don't include any vulgarities on the postcard. Use
asterisks to censor naughty words.
Send postcards to LK 1230 S. Tenth Street, Phila, PA 19147. (Make
no mention of Eyeshot.)
If you receive an e-mail from the editor,
it means he would like to read the whole story. If you don't receive an
e-mail from the editor within a month or so, it means your postcard has
been lost, stolen by another resident of the editor's building (very possible),
or doesn't really seem right for this site.
You may send as many story openings on separate postcards as you'd like.
Specific Recommendations & Restrictions
Once there was a time when asked about submission guidelines we consulted
the many sages and they all replied, "Cows never roam from pastures with
no fences." We can't deny the wisdom of the sages. And so, there shan't
be submission guidelines. EXCEPT, to recognize that some people might want
to know what we tend to post without bothering to browse the
archive, we are now happy to offer somewhat explicit recommendations:
DO NOT SEND POETRY unless (1) it's disguised as prose, (2) it's totally
nasty & perverted, or (3) you're an
Egyptian.
DO NOT SEND ANYTHING if your e-mail address includes the words writer,
write,
poet,
or anything similar. If you are under 17 years of age, it's ok. But otherwise,
please do not submit.
PLEASE TRY NOT TO SEND whimsical pieces that are loaded with dialogue
and lots of lame pop-cultural references (we prefer mythological, literary,
art-historical, and/or misanthropomorphophagical allusions).
PLEASE TRY NOT TO SEND something about an emotionally cathartic moment
from your childhood (unless it involves dead clowns).
PLEASE TRY NOT TO SEND some small, relatively unimaginative, essayistic
piece about deli meats or chapstick or dentists.
PLEASE TRY NOT TO SEND anything that anyone would ever describe as "punk
rock."
PLEASE TRY NOT TO SEND anything if your favorite author is Bukowski.
Nothing against the man, but if he's your favorite author, please
send your submission elsewhere. Again, we have no real problem with Bukowski's
writing whatsoever, but if you're all about him, that is, if write like
him way more than you write like yourself, please realize you're invited
to do two things: (1) pray for a big ol' rainstorm of sweet, sweet whisky,
and (2) insert and piston your skinny ashen thingy (assuming you're a boy)
into and out of the hole in the center of your collector's edition DVD
of Barfly.
PLEASE TRY NOT TO SEND anything if you really, really earnestly think
your stuff is "experimental."
PLEASE TRY NOT TO SEND anything that you would call "flash fiction."
Short pieces are fine to send, but not if you refer to them as "flash fiction."
We seem to have an unspecifiable problem with the term.
PLEASE REALIZE you can send any of the above but we won't accept them
unless they're really funny and/or wonderful. We tend to like things
that are denser (not so quick to include space breaks between sentences),
that are somewhat elusive and inventive and overblown languagewise and
not-so-sane aesthetically. OK? That's a hint intended to save us all time.
But then again, we are always open to reading anything you want to send
on a postcard. It may seem like there are now some fences, but they're
imaginary -- if you don't want them to be there, that's fine - think of
them as suggested fences.
PLEASE REALIZE that we used to tend to have some fun with
our rejection letters, but now we won't actively e-mail a rejection to
your postcard unless your postcard is in an envelope with cold hard cash.
The more money you send the more performatively and possibly helpfully
we'll reject the little that we read. Please don't think that including
a dollar will get you much in terms of rejection, or that sending $20 will
entice us to contact you and ask for the story. Basically, if you're feeling
masochistic and need some creative rejection in your life, you can buy
our services.
Ten volumes
of collected rejection letters are accessible here and may prove an
invaluable resource for prospective submitters interested in discerning
our editorial tendencies and taste.
PLEASE REALIZE we are no longer encouraging visitors to send stuff that's
plagiarized or transcripts of instant messages, although we did in the
past (way before Tao Lin started using gchats in his fiction).
If you would like to send physical objects (not manuscripts, but $$$
or gifts or books/music to potentially review), our mailing address again
is:
LK, 1230 S. Tenth Street, Phila, PA 19147
To learn more about this site, we offer you this
link . . .
*
A
book of blurbs for books that don't exist.
Stolen flash drive alert!
Oh so long ago
Recently
