Editor Interview: Strange Hymnal

god lives in the car wash

The HTML Review
Frozen Sea
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A Velvet Giant
Diagram
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Lullaby Machine
No Dear

Writers: Alice Notley, Anne Carson, James Tiptree Jr., Danez Smith, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, Zora Neale Hurston, Devon Walker-Figueroa, Julia Elliot, Mark Doty, George Saunders, Diane Seuss, B. K. Fischer, Erika Meitner, Jo Ann Beard, Marilyn Hacker, Eileen Myles
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Artists: David Lynch, Julio Torres, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hieronymus Bosch, Sinjun Strom, Trixie Mattel, Laura Plansker, Sylvia Whitman Palacios, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Evgeni Gordiets, Ellis & Tom, Gladis the orca

1. We spend hours talking about each piece and picking a Little Guy that represents it emotionally and spiritually.
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2. We curate pieces that fill a very specific niche. Our niche feels like watching the fire scene of The Hunchback of Notre Dame at age four, diving into a very deep pool, dissociating while rural Catholic farmers in jeans recite the Nicene Creed in unison, encountering a new and strange animal, or imagining the sounds at the bottom of the ocean.
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3. We have an experimental, innovative design that marries content and form and really isn't duplicated anywhere else.
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In sum: Strange Hymnal is a place to explore mystery. Strange Hymnal is the god who lives inside the car wash. Someone once described Strange Hymnal to us as something a person would put together during a psychotic episode—there's a thread woven through it that logically makes no sense at all, but you can feel the way these things are connected. Before we had a name our brainstorming document was called Papal Gay Animals. The best thing about Catholicism is the pagan rituals. We worship what we find holy.

Peruse our website and past issues (everything is free) to get a sense of the work we're looking for. Logistics-wise: Visit our website, our Instagram, or our Chill Subs listing for information about our reading periods and open calls for work. If you're submitting multiple pieces, please include them all in one document. Send in submissions via email, and withdraw submission by replying to your original submission email.

The ideal submission is a beautiful email we receive during our open reading period, with a PDF or Word doc attached containing no more than 5,000 words. It would be clear that the writer of the ideal submission understand, appreciates, and likes the specific aesthetic we're creating.

Submitters often submit to us outside of our reading period, include their work as a Google Doc link or multiple attachments, or withdraw their work by sending a new email or without reading our previous emails.

Don’t overthink a cover letter; we’re just two little guys. We just ask you to send us an email with your submission document attached, say hi, and tell us whatever else you want us to know before we dive into your work, if anything. Feel free to throw in your bio, though what’s contained in it doesn’t influence our decision either way.

It depends—sometimes we can tell within the first page that it's not a style or content fit; sometimes both of us read the whole piece and discuss it together at length before we reject it.

None! It's just the two of us reviewing submissions—we read and evaluate everything ourselves.

A submission lands in a bed of flowers. Electric Pam offers it a glass of milk; Liminal Neil teaches it to smell the difference between lavender and mountain sage. Two hands reach down from the ether. One hand has short, clean nails and the other has freakishly long fingers and they hold the submission between them like a child. Four eyes look at it before its fate is decided.

We proofread everything and fact-check when there are facts to check. Depending on what the piece needs, we work with the author on everything from copy edits to substantive edits. We highly value the editorial process and view it as a collaboration.

Yes! We nominate for Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Spiritual Lit, among others.

We are fully independent with no external funding. We are a team of three and do everything ourselves.

We promote our issue launches on social media with campaigns unique to issue, and we follow our contributors and share their other work whenever we're able.