How Dare You Submit to Our Literary Journal
How. Even. Dare. You.
Thank you for your interest in submitting your work to Polydactyl Typewriter. This isn’t your grandfather’s literary journal. This is a journal for people who LIVE THEIR ART OUT LOUD and DRAW GREAT BIG DICKS ON BATHROOM WALLS and ARE NO LONGER WELCOME IN THE PALISADES PARK MALL. Can you handle it, old man?!
So, like, these are our submission guidelines? Frankly, the fact you’re even looking for submission guidelines probably means you aren’t cut out to roll with our kickass crew of literary bad boys, but it’s your funeral. Polydactyl Typewriter publishes two print issues a year, three digital issues, and one experimental issue that consists of our editor shouting key phrases from your work directly into a shallow grave. Here’s what you should know before you submit:
Polydactyl Typewriter wants work that will set the world on fire. We want work that devours the bloody afterbirth of the Beat Generation, then vomits it up on the tedium of modern literary fiction. We want to read your work and be driven to madness, clawing our shirts and crawling on our hands and knees into the sewers, where we will weep and reflect on your genius until we are killed by the filth that surrounds us. As long as it’s less than 500 words.
We want emerging voices. And by “emerging,” we mean “not currently represented by an agent, but still has a well-established following that we can leverage into sales of our journal.” We define emerging voices as writers that have bylines at three major online publications, ten-thousand followers on Instagram, and at least one significant Twitter beef with Joyce Carol Oates. But if you don’t meet these criteria, you’re still welcome to submit!
I mean, you can do whatever you want. It’s a free country. We aren’t going to publish you, but hey, knock yourself out.
Polydactyl Typewriter has a commitment to amplifying diverse voices in literature. By this we mean we have retweeted Hanif Abdurraqib three times, and plan to do so again when his next poetry collection comes out. You should absolutely trust our cabal of privileged, lily-white MFA students to evaluate your work free of any unconscious or overt bias against your marginalized identity. We do it for the culture.
As of May 2019, we have switched to a monetized submission model! For only $75, your work can get bumped to the front of our submission line, where it will be rejected as quickly and efficiently as possible. Your money will go toward our research on why we can shamelessly extort money from writers we have no intention of publishing while still refusing to pay our contributors. We wish we could answer that now, but the science just isn’t there yet. You can be a part of the solution!
If you cannot afford a submission fee, we still accept non-monetized submissions. Non-monetized submissions are accepted on February 29th between 3am and 4am. Our average response time is between three hours and three thousand years. Simultaneous submissions are not accepted, because as far as we are aware Polydactyl Typewriter is the only literary journal on Earth, and despite our .00003% work acceptance rate we expect to be your sole priority.
Did we mention you can skip the line for $75? That sounds pretty good right about now, huh?
To submit, please use our Submittable page, which is for some reason not linked here. Submissions should be formatted according to arcane guidelines that only exist in our editor’s head, because we aren’t lame and old-fashioned enough to limit your creativity by providing clear and helpful directions. Please rest assured that if you do not psychically intuit these guidelines well enough to format your document to our editor’s whims, your work will be rejected immediately, and our editor will also subtweet you in a way where nobody else will make the connection but you will still be filled with shame.
Thank you for allowing Polydactyl Typewriter to continue to erode your sense of self and confidence in your work with our impersonal, expensive, and frustrating submission process. We are proud to be a part of the machine that reminds you that no matter how hard you work, money and connections will get you farther in the literary world than talent ever could. We hope to hear from you soon!
Harmony Cox is a writer based in Columbus, OH.
