You should send us your writing.
Step One.
Make sure we take what you wanna send in. We’re looking to publish poetry, essays on the reading and composition of poetry, and interviews with readers and writers of poetry directed at an english-reading audience. To develop on this last bit, we would like to assure you that we most definitely welcome work constructed around words and expressions in languages beyond english as long as the arsenal of multilingual dictionnaires, spot translation services, and pronunciation guides available on the internet suffice to render it comprehensible to a reader of english. Also, please don’t send us previously published pieces unless the location of the previous appearance was your social media profile or a school publication. Simultaneous subs are fine. Lastly, we aren’t able to pay contributors right now. We’re working on that, though. If you’re down with all this stuff, you may proceed to…
Step Two.
Prepare your submission, which should include three to six poems, one or more critical essays, and/or one or more interviews, as an electronic document of some sort. Within that document, feel free to use the formatting that suits your fancy. Please do name your document distinctively. No, filenames do not inform our editorial decisions. We’re just trying to keep your submission from getting lost in a sea of files named “3poems.docx.”
(the optional) Step Three.
Put anything you want us to know about you in a separate document – with one exception: no credentials. Seriously. No prizes, no fellowships, no school names, no degrees, no publishing houses, no journal titles. We wanna think about your work, not your reputation. If this doesn’t read like a bio statement, we’ll ask you for one upon acceptance.
Step Four.
Send us that submission! We’re not paying for newfangled shit like Submittable, so you don’t even have to worry about setting up an account there. All you need to do is attach the submission materials you’ve created to an email and send that to windowsfacingwindows@gmail.com. No pressure to structure the body of the email in any particular way, just do what’s natural for you. Also, if you use the email address you set up when you were 14 and still an Arthur superfan, we’re seriously not gonna judge you.
Reading Schedule and Response Times.
We lead rather chaotic lives – in addition to being writers, one of us is a research student, and the other works a full-time job (and is a dog mom). What we can promise is this: if you submit during the two months following an issue release (so, say, between May 15th, an issue release date, and July 15th), we’ll respond to you before the next issue comes out (for the previous example, August 15th). You’re more than welcome to submit at any time, though.
Bonus info: what we’re looking for.
If you’d like to get a feel for what we’re interested in, you can check out our issues and take a gander at these poems:
- “This living hand, now warm and capable” by John Keats (1795-1821)
- Figs from Thistles: First Fig (1918) by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Gubbinal (1921) by Wallace Stevens
- Songs (III) (1923) by E. E. Cummings
- You, Andrew Marvell (1952) by Archibald MacLeish
- Snakecharmer (1957) by Sylvia Plath
- Meditation on Statistical Method (1960) by J. V. Cunningham
- Dead Orchard (1978) by Frank Stanford
- Summing Up and Little Cambray Tamales (both 1988) by Claribel Alegría
- The Untrustworthy Speaker (1990) by Louise Glück
- Human Bodies (1992) (note: what you see there is the whole poem, it isn’t cut off) by Yehuda Amichai
- won’t you celebrate with me (1993) by Lucille Clifton
- White Dog (2004) by Carl Phillips
- The Cloud Corporation (2010) by Timothy Donnelly
- We Lived Happily During the War (2013) by Ilya Kaminsky
- I Wanted to Make Myself Like the Ravine (2014) by Hannah Gamble
- Center of the World (2015) by Safiya Sinclair
- Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself (2017) by Paige Lewis
- It’s Just That I’m Not Really into Politics (2017) by Hanif Abdurraqib
- What Use is Knowing Anything if Nobody is Around (2017) by Kaveh Akbar
- The Soundscape of Life is Charred by Tiny Bonfires (2017) by Max Ritvo
- Like Judith Slaying Holofernes (2018) by Paul Tran
- Heliocentric (2018) by Keith S. Wilson
- Zuihitsu (2018) by Jenny Xie
- If French Kissing Was As Good As Promised, Shouldn’t I Be Happy By Now? (2020, maybe?) by Emmy Newman