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Happy new year!
I hope your year is off to a great start.
Our team here is just ramping up again after taking some time off for the holidays here in the States. Now that we’re back, I wanted to update you about what we have going on.
First and foremost: submissions! I’m sure a lot of you have been wondering when you’ll receive a response from us (if ever). The short answer is: you will and we’re working on it.
The longer answer is: We haven’t forgotten about you, but to be fully transparent, we’re very behind on sending out our replies. Over the past couple years, we’ve received many more submissions than we ever have before, and our process for evaluating pieces has evolved rather slowly, which adds up to longer response times for you.
Currently, the oldest submission in our queue is dated July 2025, which is much longer than I’d like to keep people waiting. However, since our entire team–myself included–are volunteers, I don’t want us to burn out by setting a grueling reading pace. It’s also important to us that each submission gets reviewed by at least one of our editors (me, Mel, or Cerid). Finding a manageable balance between these factors has been tricky to say the least, and we haven’t quite figured it out yet, but we’re working on it.
To that end, you may have noticed that our submissions are currently closed. We decided to close for now so that our team can focus on reading through our backlog of submissions and get responses to all of you waiting. As of this writing, we expect to reopen our submissions on April 1st (no joke!) and remain open for at least a couple months after that. Keep an eye out for further updates closer to that time.
Our goal is to keep our response times reasonable. As writers ourselves, we understand the frustration of being in submission limbo, so thanks for your patience.
In other news, we have a few more new folks joining our team: slush readers and a social media intern. Check out our staff page to read about them.
And in the spirit of learning about our team, Mel has a new project up her sleeve: she’s putting together an email newsletter to share tidbits about everyone on the staff, plus offer a glimpse into the community behind our magazine. Sign up to get the newsletter sent to your email inbox, or keep an eye out on our website for updates.
As always, thanks so much for reading. It amazes me how much we’ve grown. We couldn’t do this without you.
All the best,
Elena
