This is the Official Call for Submissions for Issue 3 of Gnarled Oak, which will start in April and be an unthemed issue.

Gnarled Oak accepts poetry, prose, videos and artwork. I don’t like to impose rules on what is and isn’t acceptable (other than the no hate speech, no pornography one), but as a general guideline, I tend to favor shorter works, which for our purposes means poems of less than 20 lines, prose less than 1000 words, and videos less than 7 minutes long. Regarding form and style, I’m open to almost anything. Check out previous issues to get a sense of things.

I’ll be reading for Issue 3 through March 20 and plan on starting the Issue on April 6. Please visit the Submissions page for more in-depth guidelines. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes this way, and I hope you’ll send something and help spread the word. Thank you.

This is the Official Call for Submissions for Issue 2 of Gnarled Oak, which will be starting in January.

Now that Issue 1 is complete, I can finally say, “Check out our back issue to see what we like.” And I do hope you check out Issue 1: Starting Small if you haven’t already. Please remember, though, that Issue 1 was focused on micropoetry while Issue 2 is wide open. I will consider micro works but I’m also interested in longer stuff as well.

I’m reading for Issue 2 through January 9, 2015. Please visit our Submissions page for more in-depth guidelines. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes this way, and I hope you’ll send something and help spread the word. Thank you.

I plan to publish Gnarled Oak four times per year, the first issue slated for November 2014. In the spirit of honoring this site’s past as a micropoetry blog and because editing a journal is a new adventure for me, we’re going to start small with a micro-poetry, prose, video, art, whatever issue. I’m accepting submissions on a rolling basis, so I’m also reading for the Winter 2015 issue. Issue specific guidelines are below, and general submission information is on the submissions page.

Please consider submitting, and do help spread the word.

Submissions for Fall 2014 close at midnight October 31, 2014. Submissions for Winter 2015 close at midnight on December 31, 2014.

Thank you.

Fall 2014: Micro Issue

For the Fall 2014 issue, we’re starting small. Please adhere to the General Submission Guidelines below, but for this issue, we would like to see micropoetry, microfiction, videopoems based on micropoetry, and artwork that works with this micro/starting small theme. We’re going to follow the Twitter model, and ask that all submitted writing be tweetable. That doesn’t mean you need to be on Twitter, it just means we’re setting a 140-character limit for each submitted piece.

Regarding micropoetry… anything goes. You can submit haiku, senryu, tanka, gogyohka, small stones, lunes, haibun (for which we will accept work that goes a bit over the 140-character limit), or anything else that works. We’re not strict formalists here; just make sure the words work.

Regarding artwork… we like haiga and haiga-like things, but we’re also open to images and artwork that fit with the overall small/micro theme of the issue.

Winter 2015

This is an un-themed issue. As always, we’re looking for your best poetry, short prose, artwork, and videos. See the general submission guidelines below for more details.

Welcome to Gnarled Oak. I used to keep my micropoems here, and if you’re reading this because you subscribed between 2009 and 2012, thank you. I hope you’ll stick around for this site’s new incarnation as a literary journal.

The idea developed as I was putting together a new poetry collection, and while proofing the acknowledgments page, I realized that most of the journals that had published some of the poems in that collection had shut down: qarrtsiluni, ouroboros review, Bolts of Silk, The Houston Literary Review, and a handful of stones. Literary journals are often transient things, but some of these were true favorites, and a handful of stones was where I got my first acceptance for a poem.

Now, I don’t know if the world needs another online literary journal, but I’m pretty sure it won’t hurt anything to add a little literature, art, and beauty to the web, and anyway I had this site and URL doing nothing, so I figured it might be fun and worthwhile to see what might grow here at this old Gnarled Oak. And if I can do this even half as well as the editors of the above-mentioned journals did, I will be very happy indeed.

I hope you’ll join me, consider contributing, and help spread the word.

(Oh, and don’t forget to follow, like, or subscribe.)

Thank you.