Guidelines

  • We encourage simultaneous submissions. Please share your good news with us if you are accepted by another journal so we can remove your work from consideration.
  • Please submit in only one genre at a time.
  • We prefer that your submission refers to another work on this web site or in its archives. The connection can be to any story or picture in our magazine that your work relates to or which inspired you. We are, however, open to you connecting your poem or prose to creative work at other online literary magazines with selective editorial processes. Please indicate which writing or photograph you are referring to in your cover letter, and include a link. As an example, our masthead refers to Nancy Priff’s poem “Tin Can Talking,” which appeared in the magazine The Whistling Fire.
  • Payment is publication. You retain all rights after publication. If your work is anthologized or reprinted, please mention that the piece first appeared here.
  • We desire writing with a balance of heart and intellect. More blood, less ink, is often favored.

Poetry
Submissions should contain no more than five poems, totaling fewer than 10 pages

Submit here to the Poetry category.

Prose
Send one piece of fiction or nonfiction at a time. We do not have an absolute word count limit but we prefer word-length below 2,000 words. We are looking for well-crafted works of literary fiction. And we will eagerly consider nonfiction in the form of memoir, lyric and personal essays.

Submit here to the Fiction or Nonfiction categories.

Have a general question? Please email info@referentialmagazine.org.

Thank you, and please share, like, and follow.

Comments are closed.