The Chimaera: a literary miscellany

Back Issues

We regard the first and second issues of II as “proto-Chimaera” issues.

« Issue 2
« Issue 1
« II the Second
« II the First
 

Please also look in on The Chimaera’s insalubrious parent, The Shit Creek Review.

 Feature theme for Issue 4 

The theme, or mode, for Issue 4’s feature section will be multum in parvo (more in less) — see the main text on the right for further detail. You can submit verse and/or prose that qualifies. 

We also invite submissions of general poetry and prose, for which the topics are open, though the General section is also likely to be slimmer this time.  

If you have had work accepted and would like to send a  recorded reading, please see our voice recording FAQ.

Selection for Cover Page rotation
Each accepted poem of no more than 20 lines will automatically be considered for inclusion in the Poem of the Day rotation on our site Cover Page. Each included poem will be on the cover page for a day, then again after a set interval of days (depending on how many poems we have in the rotation set), and so on until the next issue goes up. For the duration of Issue 3, there are 18 poems in the cover-page set.

 

   

Submissions

for the September 2008 issue

Submissions for the September 2008 Issue of The Chimaera may be sent now. Deadline: August 1. Please read the General Submission Guidelines first (below). Do not send sound files with submissions; you will have the option of sending them for any accepted poems, after acceptance. 

We publish verse and prose in serious and lighter vein on a range of topics. Philosophical, confessional, satirical, polemics, speculation, pastiche, essays, reviews, fiction... you name it. We’ll publish anything that interests us if we think it will interest our readers too.

For The Chimaera Issue 4, due out in late September 2008, our usual feature theme section will this time be more of a feature mode. We want multum in parvo (much in little), work characterised by brevity and economy of effect. Don’t just think haiku and microfiction; there are many routes to multum in parvo. Contributions do not even, necessarily, have to be ultra-short: we want poems and prose pieces that impress us with their ratio of content to length. Good sonnets with no padding will qualify. Short stories (even if not short-short) where every word tells will qualify. How much can you say in a limited space?

Issue 4 will also, as usual, include a section with a miscellany of verse and prose in various styles and on various themes. Submissions are invited for this general section as well. We still want to publish some longer poems and some essays and fiction. However, in the interest of keeping the overall volume down this time, we intend to be very selective — a limited number of pages will be available for the more expansive work.

Please read all the guidelines before submitting. Other things being equal we are more likely to accept work that is easier for us to prepare for publication. 

Possible submission routes, in order of preference:

  • Online submission via our form — an easy way to submit if you’re just sending two or three poems without much, or complex, formatting. (You will receive an automated response showing your text as received.) Not only is this easy for you, but it often means less work for us than the other options, because submissions arrive with minimal formatting codes, etc. We prefer that you use this method when sending up to three poems, and you may also use it for longer submissions.  
  • Plain-text mail, if your text contains no significant formatting.
  • Formatted (HTML) mail with your text in the body of the message. If necessary, you can copy into the message from a Word or other document.
  • An RTF or Word file sent as an email attachment. This is suitable for longer prose work or any work with complex formatting (indents, step-breaks, lots of italics, and so on). Preferably, don’t send a Word file unless your virus-checker will scan it; save out as RTF and send that instead. If you send a Word file or an RTF file saved from Word, please pay attention to our formatting notes below regarding line and paragraph breaks. A line break within a poem needs to be a line break, not a paragraph break.     

You will notice that we include authors’ sound files with some poetry. If we accept your poetry, we will ask if you would like to send one or more sound files. (Some technical notes are available which might be useful if you are new to voice recording.) Please do NOT send any sound files with initial submisssions.

Send your best 1–5 poems, or one or more prose pieces, indicating with each whether you are submitting for multum in parvo or the general section.

Although we are primarily a text-based literary and general electronic magazine, artists are invited to send in image submissions relating to the Chimaera and other fabulous beasts.

Submissions for The Chimaera Issue 4 must be received by August 1, 2008.

E-mail submissions: editor@the-chimaera.com

General Submission Guidelines

  1. The Chimaera will publish three issues a year, in January, May, and September, and seeks to present high-quality original work in the fields of poetry and prose.
  2. We are interested in all sorts of well-written poetry, including satirical and humorous verse.
  3. We are also interested in various sorts of prose relating to literature, culture, history or general social issues: critical prose, essays, causeries, reminiscences, polemics, historiography, biographies, review, and what have you. If you have an idea for a piece of writing but are unsure of what our response might be, ask us. For a prose essay or story, length may normally be up to about 4000 words, but we prefer submissions between 700 and 3000 words.  However, note the special requirements applicable to Issue 4 as noted above. 
  4. In fiction, we publish complete short stories only, not sections of novels.  
  5. Submission deadline dates and themes (if any) for the next issue will be specified in each current issue, but you may submit work at any time. If your submission is too late for the deadline date for one issue it will be placed in the batch for the next.
  6. In poetry, we are biased towards formalism, but by no means dismissive of vers libre. We are looking for original work which deals with a wide variety of issues and imagery, including that which might test or challenge boundaries, or disturb sensibilities. But it must be well executed. Please do not send us work which has not been extensively drafted, crafted and polished. We will assume that whatever is sent is checked, edited and final, and not subject to editing during production or in proofing (except to correct errors).
  7. Previous publication is not a problem as long as the previous publisher does not hold copyright. You must inform us of any previous publication when you submit. Posting to blogs or online workshops is not in our opinion publishing, so any such poems or other pieces are clearly eligible. We reserve the right to archive your work as part of this site, and with your specific consent to publish it in a print anthology later; but all other rights remain with the author.
  8. The person who submits work must be the original author.
  9. We accept simultaneous submissions, but please inform us immediately if the submission is accepted elsewhere.
  10. Poets should submit 1–5 poems; writers of prose, one or more prose pieces. Contributions should be sent via our online form, or in the body of an email, or as .doc or .rtf file attachments if necessary to preserve formatting. (See above on Word/RTF attachments.)
  11. Text contributions, whether poetry or prose, should be single-spaced and should not contain special formatting (indents, font changes, and so on) except as absolutely necessary to the work. (See below on formatting and house style.) 
  12. If you send your submission in a .doc or .rtf file attachment, please include your surname as the first word of the file name, e.g. Smith_poems.doc. This makes it easier to file and sort submissions.
  13. Please include your surname and the word “submission” in the subject line of your email, e.g. “Dylan Thomas submission”. If you are submitting to the special feature section, please add its name; so this time it might be “Dylan Thomas submission (Translation theme)”. 
  14. Visual art contributions should be as jpeg (.jpg) files and may be sent as attachments. Image submissions should be original work or cite relevant permissions from copyright owners.
  15. All contributors should include brief third-person biographical details of up to five lines.
  16. Online submissions are acknowledged at once. We will attempt to acknowledge receipt of all email submissions within two weeks of arrival, and to respond with a decision within six weeks. However, sometimes a decision might be delayed until the end of the current submissions period.
  17. There is no payment for publication in The Chimaera, which at present is a free web-only publication and receives no income.

Formatting: Line Breaks

If you copy your text into the body of a mail message, please check that all your line breaks are showing and correct on the screen before you send.

When typing poems in Word or another word processor, please try to make each new line after the first with a line break rather than a paragraph break. In Word and most other programs, use Shift+Enter instead of Enter. The difference might not be obvious unless you use your Word or other program’s controls to make non-printing characters visible, but if you can avoid using paragraph breaks except where you truly need a paragraph break, you will help reduce the editors’ work. When we convert the text for the Web, a paragraph in (say) Word becomes a (spaced) paragraph in HTML, and if each of your lines is a separate paragraph these then have to be changed. Basically, a paragraph will have space after it. Either make a single paragraph of the whole poem — with a double line break at the end of each stanza, strophe or other spaced division — or make a separate paragraph for each such division.

Other Formatting Issues

Preferably, put the whole text in one font (say, Times) and keep any title or subhead formatting simple.

Avoid beginning each prose paragraph with an indent (string of spaces or tab). That will only make extra work for us in removing them, since it is not our paragraphing style. But it’s helpful if you block-indent a whole quoted passage of prose or poetry.

Put one space (not two) after each period, comma or semicolon. 

For footnotes or endnotes, avoid using Word’s special footnoting/endnoting system, which is hard to convert. Just put (1) or whatever in the text and a correspondingly numbered note at the end.

Where you want a dash in the text, insert a double hyphen or use Word’s AutoReplace feature to insert an actual em dash.

Editorial Practice and House Style

The Editors will endeavour to preserve authors’ indents (in poetry lines), strophe breaks, step-breaks, bold and italic style, and use of upper-case and lower-case letters. Authors’ font choices will not be preserved — unless they happen to coincide with the fonts chosen for the Web pages. 

Your British or Australian or Canadian or American spelling will remain. We may edit for consistency in minor typographical details such as em-dashes, en-dashes, quotation marks, and the placement of punctuation inside or outside closing quotes. In these matters, practice varies somewhat from publisher to publisher and country to country. With readers and contributors from all over, we won’t be able to match what everyone was taught as correct or normal, so we’ll probably just do what’s correct or normal for us.

Our standard style for quotes is to use typographer’s double quotation marks, reserving single quotation marks for the occasional quote-within-quote requirement. Our standard style for em dashes is to set them with a space before and after, because this better suits the fonts we are specifying.