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 non-fiction
We love creative non-fiction that strikes a fine balance between those terms. This is to say that we are looking for prose that is lyrical in language and thoughtful in content, arresting the heart and the mind in honest, provocative ways. We want to read writing that speaks to our souls and moves us to think, to do, to be. We are drawn to writing that does something interesting with form as well, although this is not a requirement for literature that resonates. Writers whose creative non-fiction dazzles us include Maxine Hong Kingston, Maggie Nelson, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dorothy Allison, Claudia Rankine, James McBride, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to name a few.
Poetry
Poetry eludes definition, and we embrace those who inhabit the liminal space at the borders of this expansive medium. We are looking for poetry that elicits emotion rather than focusing on form. To us, the common centrality of poetry, and that which made it so dangerous to Plato he wrote that it should be banished from the ideal society, is its ability to ignite and inspire people to action. We value poems that are laconic and seek to say much with so little. Poetic heroes include e. e. cummings, Mary Oliver, Len Roberts, and Mahogany L. Browne.
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. Everyone who submits and meets ORP’s submission criteria 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.