Thursday, March 30, 2006

Submission Guidelines

Blood Orange Review has a thoughtful and inquisitive bent, as well as a humorous one. We are not afraid of the erudite or environmental; however, if we bristle or stop having fun, we figure there is a good chance our readers will too. In a word, write deftly. Leave us desiring more. As an on-line journal, we are looking for intense, waste-free language.

Please follow the guidelines below for submissions:

Fiction: up to 3,000 words.

Non-Fiction: creative/personal essay or stand-alone memoir excerpt up to 2,500 words.

Poetry: 3-5 poems at a time.

Book Reviews: send at least two timely and relevant reviews, up to 500 words.

Interviews: interviews with intriguing individuals active in the writing community, up to 3,000 words.

Our review is modestly sized; as a result, our selection is competitive. Send us only your best work. The editors are professional and passionate: we look for work that is precise, fierce, and unusual.

Submit as a Microsoft Word attachment (single spaced, one extra space between each paragraph). Also, paste the document into the body of the email text. Include your name, address, phone number and email on the first page. Simultaneous submissions are okay. A short bio is optional, but appreciated. Original, unpublished material is preferred, but reprints will be considered if author has the rights. Send submissions to: submissions@bloodorangereview.com

Why Blood Orange?

Blood Orange Review is the joint effort of Stephanie Lenox and Heather K. Hummel. The review publishes fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, book reviews, and interviews with interesting people actively involved in the literary world. The aim is to publish and make readily accessible the best, freshest, most exciting work by new and established writers.

Editors Stephanie and Heather became friends during their term of service with Literacy AmeriCorps in Seattle, Washington. In order to escape their cubicles in the book distribution center of the King County Public Library, they scheduled weekly "committee meetings" at the Caffeine Messiah (where coffee is a religion) among other Seattle coffee shops. There they journaled, shared work, and discussed ways to incorporate poetry into the E.S.L. classes they were teaching for the library.

Later, they shared a house in Cheney, Washington where Heather attended Eastern Washington University. With a limited decorating budget, they started scribbling poems on the kitchen wall. They spent time with the poems over morning coffee and evening wine, learning as each poem revealed its intricate stories like actors against a drive-in movie screen—gargantuan against the skyline.

Now, thousands of miles between them, with one foot in the desert and one foot on the coast, without a communal kitchen wall to scribble on, they've created Blood Orange Review as a common space where they can share and contemplate writing they enjoy.

The blood orange in the title originates from an old poem (by Heather) that uses the startling fruit as a way to articulate those things in life, like good writing, that we inexplicably taste and carry with us because they are bold, unusual, and necessary.