Submission Guidelines You Wish You’d Read Earlier

Originally published in The Rumpus on March 27, 2018

Dusty Jake is an online literary publication featuring personal essays, conceptual short stories, poetry, and obnoxious compositions that purposefully defy conventional categorization.

Before​ ​Submitting

Please spend at least ninety minutes familiarizing yourself with the content featured on our website to determine if your piece would be a good fit. Failure to do so will be made glaringly obvious by your writing and your submission will be discarded immediately.

Before submitting, we advise you to read Roger Sloane’s 1999 instructional essay “Why We Write; How We Write; What To Write; Write, Write, Write” before listening to Sloane’s 2011 TED Talk “Hang On, I’ve Completely Changed My Philosophy on Writing.”

Restrictions

Dusty Jake does not accept personal opinion pieces, topical items, or picture-based stories. Nor do we accept fiction based on the themes of war, love, grief, crime, romance, education, poverty, addiction, innocence, beauty, religion, fulfilment, economics, feminism, technology, perseverance, or anything to do with society in general.

The words “behoove,” “cordially,” and “bedpan” are not looked upon favorably by the Dusty Jake editors. The same can be said of the passive voice and the inability to appreciate a grammar joke.