Submissions

Please read both the general and genre-specific guidelines carefully before submitting.

General Guidelines

All submissions must be previously unpublished, typed, with your name and email address on every page.  

Submit my email: route2@fsc.edu. The editors respond only by email. 

Include your submission in the body of your message. If an attachment is necessary (for formatting reasons, say) then save your work as a Word or RTF file. Artists and photographers should submit PDFs. ss formatting calls for an attachment, and even then, save your work as a MS Word or a PDF file).

Include a brief biography in your cover letter.

We read submissions between September and January every year. You may submit at any time, but understand that a response from the editors will arrive within a month of the submission deadline.

We permit simultaneous submissions, but please notify us if your work is accepted elsewhere. 

While Route 2 is primarily a print publication, we do want to expand our online content. If you do not wish to have your work appear online, please indicate so in your cover letter.

Fiction

1. Stories should not exceed 2500 words, though we will make exceptions for exceptional pieces.

2. Send one story at a time.

3. Double space your story.

4. In general, the editors tend to prefer literary fiction. We have published genre fiction in the past, but, as a rule, we prefer not to see vampires, werewolves, zombies, and assorted monsters in fiction. Or in life for that matter.

5. We welcome work in newer genres, flash/sudden/micro fiction, found objects arranged meaningfully, graphic novel excerpts, etc.

Poetry

1. Submit three to five poems. We find that when writers submit more than five, the individual merit of each poem is diluted; when they submit fewer, we occasionally have to ask to see more work.

2. Beware the first person pronoun.

3. Beware the second person pronoun.

4. Beware vague abstractions. Blacklist words such as pain, heart, and most beautiful.

5. Go easy on the rhyme. Don't be controlled by it. Find other ways of arranging your line breaks.

6. Do not mask your inability to punctuate or capitalize correctly by avoiding it altogether. If you have a legitimate and conscious aesthetic reason to flout these graceful strokes of meaning, then go ahead.

7. Feelings are great, sure. We wish you well in the struggle. But what else can poetry do apart from express your feelings?

Art

1. We accept photographs, drawings, paintings, designs.

2. Do not send more than five images for us to look at. Alternatively, you can direct us to images on your website.

3. We prefer work that reproduces well in black and white.

4. Send high resolution files. Our layout artist is scrupulous about this.

Dreams

1. We would like to see more plays, screenplays, graphic stories, cartoons.

2. We talk about your work for days after reading.