Submission Guidelines

Please use our submission manager to submit all writing and artwork. The submission manager is  here. 

Make sure you add green submissions (our online manager) to your address book or log-in to see if a decision has been made.

We love previously unpublished quirky writing that makes sense, preferably flash fiction (less than 1000 words). We are eager to read short creative nonfiction also. We rarely accept submissions that have over 2700 words. We enjoy poems that we understand, preferably not rhyming poems, unless you make the rhyme so fascinating we’ll wonder why we ever said anything about avoiding rhymes. Give us something fresh, unexpected, and will make us say, “Wow!” We’re not interested in homophobic, religious rants, or pornographic, violent stories. Please avoid using offensive language.

We are always interested in publishing intriguing photography, artwork, and graphic (you know, comics) literature. If you are sending a one-page comics or excerpts from a graphic novel, use PDF or. JPG format.  Send all artwork as jpg or gif.  We like to have at least three images. Remember to include your brief  third person bio.

This sounds lame, but it drives us crazy when contributors fail to send this information: write your name and e-mail address on all attachments or you will probably never hear back from us.

At the end of the year, we’ll use selected works from our website for the annual print anthology.  Snail mail submissions will not be returned. Paste all your poems into one attachment.  Always include a short (less than 50 words) third person bio.  Please send no more than two prose selections and no more than 5 poems. Wait until your hear from us before you send more work. If your work is accepted by another publication, please  notify us immediately.

We are unable to pay for work. If the work we have posted is later used in another magazine, we ask that you credit Foliate Oak for first publishing it. Authors retain their own rights and copyright to their works. Foliate Oak only requests one-time, nonexclusive rights. Work will remain archived indefinitely, unless author/artist ask that it be removed from our website.

After you receive a rejection/acceptance notice, please wait one month before submitting new work. Submission Period:  August 1 -April 24. We do not read submissions during summer break.

If you need to contact us for anything other than submitting your work, please write to:  foliateoak@uamont.edu

If you found our website through Duotrope, please let them know about the status of your submission so they can document it for their files.

Kurt Vonnegut Writing Tips

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.