Submissions are Open

Submissions to Seaside Gothic are open from 9th October to 15th October 2023 for fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual collections of photographs or illustrations!

If you want to submit a short story, a poem, a piece of creative nonfiction, or a set of images, we would love to see it, but please make sure you check your submission fits with the Seaside Gothic aesthetic and meets the terms stated on the Submissions page before submitting. If you would like to read about previous Seaside Gothic submission statistics, they are available to subscribers.

All written submissions should exist as stand-alone works of no more than 1,000 words. Visual submissions should be a set or collection of no less than five and no more than ten images which work coherently together. Each submission needs to meet the three criteria that define seaside gothic literature:

1. It is led by emotion, not reason, exploring the human experience mentally and spiritually as well as physically, and is unashamed to embrace the violence of the sea and the wind along with the beauty of the land and the sky and the ever-changing tide.
2. It addresses duality—land and sea, love and hate, the beautiful and the grotesque—to reflect the structures that line the coast, which are both those solidly braced against the fiercest elements and those built from what surrounds in a state of shanty transience.
3. It connects to the edge, living on the seaside either literally or figuratively, and has one foot in the water and the other on solid ground, presenting the juxtaposition of a physical border with open space and a wilderness of water that provides life yet is inconsumable.

To see the type of work Seaside Gothic is actively looking for, please read examples from the previous Issues.

Seaside Gothic kindly asks for first UK publication rights and a three month exclusivity period beginning from the date of publication of the print Issue. Accepted work is published both in print (ISSN 2752-7867) and digitally (ISSN 2755-001X), with print copies available for purchase through seasidegothic.com and in a selection of retailers, and digital content available online as a mix of free-to-access and subscriber-exclusive items accessible through a Patreon subscription. Seaside Gothic is a non-profit magazine which pays for accepted content with rates based upon income. There are no submission fees.

Submissions will stay open until midnight Greenwich Mean Time at the end of 15th October 2023. For full submission details please see the Submissions page.