Merion West Gold Star Program Gold Star

We look for well-constructed and considered pieces. Merion West craves fiction with design, dialogue, tone, character, and setting that surprise our readers and us. The Merion West team wants to feel words float off the page as we read. We look forward to reading your submissions. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please let us know.

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR NONFICTION IN MERION WEST

As a magazine that covers culture and politics, we welcome essays, book reviews, and op-eds that contribute to contemporary discourse in these areas. The following guidelines delineate some of our main preferences.

1) We welcome essays that contribute to an elevated discourse. Essays should be thoughtful, well-researched, not excessively polemical, and strive to make the timely timeless and the timeless timely.

2) As a magazine that does not pander to short attention spans, we welcome long-form essays if they are well-written, well-argued, and make a lively contribution to political and cultural discourse.

3) Per (2), we do not set a ceiling on length. The essay should be as long or short as it needs to be. We generally prefer that essays not exceed 4,000 words, but when the quality of the essay permits, we are happy to publish.

4) Book reviews should be on books published within the last three years.

5) Op-eds should generally not exceed 1,200 words, with some flexibility depending on the quality of the article, or in limited cases, the necessity of elaborating on a point relevant to the argument. Op-eds should address something topical and timely.

6) Students who seek to publish an article based on a school paper should revise and prepare the paper so that it has the form of an essay for public consumption. Essays that read like a paper written for an academic course, or otherwise suffer from a style of academic formalism, will not be accepted.

7) We try to preserve the original prose of the author as much as possible, so we do not try to over-edit. With that in mind, we prefer submissions that are not drafts but, rather, polished, finished pieces.

8) For a greater sense of the types of articles the magazine prefers to publish, please review some of the articles already published on the website.

9) Please provide a short bio.

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The Arts section of Merion West invites essays about poetry, to be titled “A Fresh Look at ____,” the blank representing a poet and one of her or his poems—for example, “A Fresh Look at Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s ‘Death of an Infant.’” The poem may be taken from any tradition within world culture and any era up through the end of the 20th century. The poet may be famous or one needing to be “rescued from history.”

The essay may also consider the elements of poetry—for example, “A Fresh Look at Syntax.”

We do not publish previously published essays. While we permit simultaneous submissions, please inform us if your essay is accepted elsewhere. At that point, please decide which publication you desire your work to appear in. If it is somewhere other than Merion West, please withdraw your work from MW in Duotrope and notify us. The literary world runs on good etiquette.

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We look forward to reading your poetry. Please follow our submission guidelines:

Merion West only publishes first serial rights. We do not publish poems that have been appeared elsewhere, including on websites and social media. We want to be the first to unveil your grand and beautiful Poem to the world. After publication, rights revert to the poet. Merion West requires that you credit our magazine with the first serial publication of the poem in future publications or books.

Whether the verse is formal, experimental, or “free verse,” we appreciate poetry that adeptly uses a poetic line and stanza and explores the tension that exists between the sentence and the line. A poem is an artifact—a made thing—wrought from words and separate from everyday speech. Colloquial speech, of course, appears in many great poems, but somehow it is exalted into something memorable to human sensibilities. It is wholly possible to make a cliché fresh—just not easy by any measure.

At Merion West, we believe that form precedes content. Merion West welcomes a vast range of themes.

We have a keen appreciation for skill with prosody—i.e., the music of a poem—whether that music is sweet or hard and clashing. The use of consonance, assonance, alliteration, enjambment, and a feel for the drama of the sentence broken by the line is encouraged. We believe that poetry is written first with the ear, second with the eye.

We enjoy a balance of imagery versus rhetoric, with pride of place going to sharp, memorable images. When a poem is discursive, one hopes the discourse is subtle. Even outrage may be sung—thus, opera.

Poems ideally are serious, but not self-serious. As such, we invite wit and satire.

We do not stipulate length—just ensure the poem is as long or as short as it needs to be. One to three poems per submission is about right. Please provide a short bio.

For a greater sense of the magazine’s stance on poetics, please read some of Austin Allen James’s essays on poetry in Merion West, as well as those of our guest poetry essayists and former arts editor Johnny Payne. We are contributing to an international conversation about poetry. Please also refer to the poetry that Merion West has published. Give us your best!

We welcome translations of poetry into English from any language. Please provide the original text in the source language if possible.

Publishing with us no more than once per year is the norm.

While we permit simultaneous submissions, please inform us if it is accepted elsewhere. At that point, please decide which publication you desire your work to appear in. If it is someone other than Merion West, please withdraw your work from us in Duotrope and notify us. The literary world runs on good etiquette.

Submit