Olivia Smith // Blog Director
Finding places to submit your work can be one of the hardest parts of writing. With hundreds of different presses, journals, and literary magazines, the choices are overwhelming. Sure, there are plenty of catalogs – DuoTrope, The Review Review Classifieds, and New Pages to name a few – that help narrow down the options. But even with those resources, figuring out what is a good fit for your writing can be exhausting. In this miniseries, I’m going to be finding and showcasing all the best presses so you don’t have to.
What is Shambles?
When the pandemic hit, the students of BatCat, a high school run press specializing in handbound limited editions, were at a loss. As the 2020-2021 school year became mostly virtual, it became clear that BatCat had to evolve.
Deanna Baringer, BatCat founder, managing editor, and faculty advisor, pitched the idea of creating a new entity: Shambles. An entirely online publication, it was the perfect way for the students to continue reading submissions, edit, and publish, regardless of how the school met throughout the pandemic.
“We’re still publishing. We’re still doing creative things. But it’s online now. We had to start from scratch,” said Lucas Cain, a sophomore and one of Shambles’s web designers.
A large part of that new start came from creating the Shambles brand. The online journal embraces its name and the source of its creations. Like a phoenix out of the ashes (or a hedgehog out of shambles), this lit journal arose from a very real disaster with hopes of making things, in some small part, better.
“In a day and age where every day it feels like things are getting progressively worse, there needs to be hope. We find the strange and the weird and the really fun to read things that are also approaching subjects that we can really benefit from talking about because they aren’t talked about enough,” said Molly Green, a sophomore and one of Shambles’s editors.
How to Submit to Shambles
Shambles accepts poetry, flash fiction, and flash creative nonfiction. Aside from a short wordcount, the most important thing to keep in mind is the content. Since Shambles is run by high school students, they can only publish things school appropriate; things like gratuitous sex, violence, or excessive swearing will likely not be published. If you couldn’t watch it on cable TV, you probably can’t read it on Shambles’s website.
So what actually do the Shambles staff look for in a piece? They love the offbeat and things that embrace the shambles.
“I’ve been looking for things that are humorous in nature and written in a unique style. In the name shambles, I look for things that are talking about things that are difficult. That may sound very contradictory, but shambles is this idea of disaster. ‘The world is in shambles.’ ‘My life is in shambles.’ Whatever it is, it’s this idea that you can approach dark or hurtful subjects and bring this sense of light and sense of humor to them in an effort to make it better to heal from it,” said Green.
“One of my biggest criteria is things that really stick with me,” said Jayden Nelson, a senior on Shambles and the managing visual arts director.
You can submit through Submittable for free and expect a response within three months. You can view their submission guidelines here.
“I always encourage people to submit because we’re always looking. We love students to submit. We accept people of all people of all experiences and all ages,” said Cain.
How to Support Shambles
You can view all of Shambles’s pieces on their website for free. You can also follow them on twitter (@readshambles) and Instagram (@readshambles). Their social media has a self-proclaimed “fifty-year-old woman vibe” and plenty of hedgehog pictures to go around.
But the best way to support Shambles is by just reading their pieces.
“It’s good to have your work out there and published, but it’s even more rewarding to know that people are genuinely reading it and enjoying it, which is our main goal. You can actually like posts on [our website], and you can share it with your friends and your family,” said Green.
Though we all hope that the pandemic will soon dissipate, the students of Shambles plan to keep publishing, even after we return to “normal.” Until then, check out their work and determine what writing in shambles looks like to you.
Check out my next Press Spotlight for another awesome submission opportunity!