SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Oyster River Pages will accept fiction and creative nonfiction submissions for publication in our seventh annual special issue from October 11th, 2024 to November 25th, 2024.

Our special issue will be led and operated by our 2024 creative nonfiction intern Meredith MacLeod Davidson. Please read her call for submissions here:

For this special issue, we're looking for works of short, flash, or micro-fiction and creative nonfiction on the theme of “aperture.” In photography, the aperture is the space through which light enters the camera. In architecture, apertures are commonly windows or doors: points of access or boundary between the interior and exterior spaces. An aperture can be a point of connection, or control. It can be an opening, a gap, a portal, or chasm. An aperture can be a wound. A point of entry, or of no return. In fiction, we're looking for braided flash or micro snapshots, surrealist, realist, magically realist, speculative, or even auto-fiction; fiction encountering the aperture of the void, fiction exploring grief, or borders, or time travel, or birth. Fiction examining the artist, the photographer, the painter. In creative nonfiction, we’re looking for lyric essays as snapshots, or memoirs as explorations of experience oriented around a single entry point. We’re looking for hybrid works, works of ekphrasis, essays, and more. Wildly creative interpretations of the theme of “aperture” are welcome, as are the explicitly literal – send us your discoveries, musings, glimpses, and memories as stories. Please ensure work is submitted in a legible, serif font (think Times New Roman or Garamond). We’re not too fussed about size or spacing. Please nothing longer than 3500 words. If sending flash, please send no more than 3 pieces of up to 1000 words each, and micros of no more than 10 pieces of 100 words each. Accepted authors can expect to engage in a brief editorial process – we hope you will submit with a willingness to discuss recommended changes with the aim of enhancing your work for publication.  

We are especially eager to publish pieces that engage with the work of marginalized and decentered people—Black and Brown creators, LGBTQ+ creators, and creators of all levels of dis/ability, and to that end, we invite creators to self-identify in their submissions.

Please note that Oyster River Pages will not publish any work that has been created, in part or in full, or in collaboration with generative artificial intelligence. Should we find that work published on our site has been created with the support of generative artificial intelligence, we reserve the right to remove such work from our site and rescind publication.

Incarcerated persons, or others unable to use Submittable, may send submissions to:

Oyster River Pages
Attn: Submissions
P.O. Box 706
Lewes, DE 19958

We regret that we cannot reply to all postal submissions. If you do not hear from us within six months, assume that we have declined your submission.