About Us

We are The Metaworker, an online literary magazine where great stories are forged.

We started out as a group of graduates from Chapman University in Orange, California, where our founding members were editors of the on-campus lit-mag, Calliope. Pretty damn satisfied with how that went, once they’d graduated, they realized they weren’t done. So they had a few meetings, threw ideas around, and the result was this magazine.

That was in August 2015 and The Metaworker has been going strong ever since. We’ve gained some editors and lost some editors, and we’ve grown a lot since our (mostly) humble beginnings, but our mission is still the same: to publish great things to read. We don’t care if you’re an established writer or someone who’s never been published before, if you’re a student or returning to writing after a career in something else, if you’re 16 or 80, if you live in the United States, in India, in New Zealand, in Mexico – if you’ve got something you think needs to be shared with the world, submit it to us!

Holy shit yes! How do I submit?

Is what you should have said. But we forgive you if you didn’t. Before you do submit, which you will, there are some guidelines to remember:

We accept fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art, plus we’re adding a misc category for submissions that fit into none of those categories. Basically, if it can be put onto a WordPress blog, submit it to us. One of our goals is to be open-minded. We want new ideas, and work that won’t find a place anywhere else. We want you to surprise us, show us something we haven’t seen before. Send us your quirky, unconventional work, the stuff you don’t think will get published, but that you love too much to let it stay buried in a folder on your laptop. We want new perspectives, words that make us ponder, narratives that upend stereotypes. If it doesn’t look like anything else we’ve published, even better – we want to see it!

Which means that our policy on literary versus genre fiction is: submit both. You can also submit both form poetry and free verse. We enjoy reading creative nonfiction, but don’t send us research papers or news articles. Nothing against journalists, but we’re just not that kind of magazine.

Our max word count is 3,000. But anything up to that we’ll consider. Give us everything from your six word story to your condensed ten page autobiography.

Regarding controversial subject matter: we are lenient. And by that, we mean, we’ll look at anything. Jesus, we’re millennials. We grew up with the internet. If you can horrify us we’ll be impressed and do not take that as a challenge. While we will look at anything, make sure whatever edgy content you use contributes to the story. We have no interest in shock value.

We accept simultaneous submissions, and bleh to litmags that don’t. Do you honestly think you can proudly announce: “we have a 98% rejection rate!” and then expect people to only submit to you instead of hedging their bets? Puh-leeze. Our only requirement is that you let us know if it is a simultaneous submission and *especially* if it’s been accepted elsewhere. That being said: we may even publish things that have been accepted elsewhere, so long as you hold the copyright.

We currently do not pay for submissions. While we’d love to, we’re doing this ourselves as a labor of love. Since we have no income, we have nothing to pay. Sorry. But if you want to help us change that, we’re now on Patreon, where our goal is to raise enough moolah so that our contributors can get paid.

Even if you have zero interest in submitting, follow us. We update every Monday at noon PST with fresh new writing and art that you won’t want to miss, plus we sometimes post fun extras (like our podcast episodes) on Wednesdays or Fridays.

We’ve evolved over the years and we’re not done yet. We have a lot of ideas for the future of The Metaworker (like this cool #MetaworkerSwag) so if you love what we’re doing, consider donating and tell your friends about us! Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Patreon, come chat with us in our Discord writing group, sign up for our newsletter, heck even bookmark our website on your browser of choice, because we need all the support we can get if we’re going to make this even better. 

P.S. If you want to know more about our origin story and what we look for in submissions, check out this interview!