What we love
ORP is the unlikely collaboration of five lovers of literature and art spread across two continents. Once upon a time, we all lived in lands shaped by the Susquehanna River, and our years there have stuck with us like silt in our swim trunks. Like the work of the nineteenth-century Impressionists (how's that for self-flattery?), ORP was born out of the frustrated conviction that too much fine work goes unseen and unrecognized. We delight in celebrating new discoveries. We want your best work, especially if it's been wandering homeless for a while.
ORP is interested in publishing voices that speak to what it means to be alive in this world. We look for language and stories and images that move us out of ourselves and into other spaces. We are a literary journal and we embrace the reality that the personal has become the political. This means that even though we are not seeking purely political submissions, we do actively seek to publish those who bring balance and diversity to historical institutions of power. We are committed to disseminating the voices of those who need to and must be heard—decentered and marginalized voices—whose words and images transcend ignorance and prejudice to reveal the nuanced, resilient, connective power of humanity.
At ORP, art that is provocative and evocative has a champion, a fan club, a posse of groupies.
Fiction
In fiction, we want an emotional experience. Understated hilarity, breathtaking heartbreak, nostalgia that hits like a concussion. Dispassionate, distant narrators leave us cold, but we're not looking for melodramatic histrionics. We want to be surprised by how a story makes us feel, and the key to surprise is originality. Literary heroes include James Baldwin, Kate Chopin, Justin Torres, Jamie O’Neill, Marilynne Robinson, Christopher Isherwood, Jhumpa Lahiri, E.M. Forster, Hanya Yanagihara, and Sandra Cisneros.
Creative nonfiction
In creative nonfiction, we search for essays that explore rather than account. This is to say we are looking for essays that allow their authors to investigate their experiences, their lives, themselves — essays that are larger than the events they convey. We want to see prose that is lyrical, thoughtful, and strikingly honest. We are drawn to writing that makes us feel, that allows us to think, to do, to be. Writers that move us include Zadie Smith, James Baldwin, Alexander Chee, Joan Didion, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kathryn Schulz, Joyce Carol Oates, among others.
Poetry
We seek to further the legacy of documenting the history of the heart through the dissemination of poets whose verses exist in defiance of indifference, cruelty, and oppression to reveal the nuanced, resilient, compassionate, and connective power of humanity. To us, the uniting power of poetry is its ability to ignite and inspire people to action. We are especially committed to publishing poems that evoke emotion rather than focusing on form. Poetic heroes include e.e. cummings, Audre Lorde, Gabriela Mistral, Mary Oliver, Langston Hughes, Patricia Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, Kahlil Gibran, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Glück.
Visual Art
We love the interplay of words and images in the visual world. Some of the most compelling visual arts utilize items that have been repurposed or recycled in spaces and ways that bend the ordinary narrative and extend their lives. Two-dimensional artworks that explore the inherent qualities of what makes a photograph a photograph or a drawing, a drawing, and so on, are also especially successful. We admire the work of Carrie Mae Weems, Christine Sun Kim, Salman Toor, and Ai Weiwei.
Emerging Voices—Fiction and Poetry
ORP’s editorial team intimately understands what it’s like for creatives to be in the early stages of the artistic journey and we are aware of the challenges in publishing, especially for those of us who may not have access to traditional literary resources and supports. ORP seeks to be a source of empowerment for all members of the artistic community, including those of us who are just beginning to submit their work to journals. We seek to demystify the publishing process by being a welcoming and inclusive space.
Within this context, ORP’s Emerging Voices seeks short stories and poems from new voices who have published no more than two publications and meet our submission criteria. The first 100 individuals who submit in each genre will receive at least one or two lines of constructive feedback with the intent of strengthening their piece(s). Writers and poets who submit creative work that exhibits a strong potential for publication will be invited to work closely with ORP’s respective Emerging Voices Editor to polish their pieces through a review and resubmit process with the intent of publication in Oyster River Pages.
While Emerging Voices focuses on fiction and poetry given ORP’s editorial capacity, we expect to expand this service to visual artists and creative nonfiction writers in future years.