Back Issues
We regard the first and second issues of II as “proto-Chimaera” issues.
« Issue 4
« Issue 3
« Issue 2
« Issue 1
« II the Second
« II the First
Please also look in on The Chimaera’s insalubrious parent, The Shit Creek Review.
If you have had work accepted and would like to send a recorded reading, please see our voice recording FAQ.
Selection for Poem of the Day
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 5, there are 15 poems in the cover-page set. The poem changes at midnight GMT.
Submissions
Next submission period: September 1 – November 30
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.
June 1: We are now closed for submissions to Issue 6 (due online July 2009). We will be open for submissions to Issue 7 from September 1 to November 30.
We do not remain open for submissions throughout the year. There is a set submission period per issue. Outside the prescribed submission periods, we will not be accepting submissions and our online submissions form will not function.
Submissions for Issue 6 have closed. We will be open for submissions to Issue 7 from September 1 to November 30. Between those dates we will accept submissions via the online form (preferred) or by email at the address given below. Submit only once per submission period.
For The Chimaera Issue 6, due out July 2009, our Feature Theme will be poems in well-wrought form. Stephen Edgar, Spotlight Poet in the current issue, is helping to make the selection of poems for the feature theme.
Issue 6 will also include the usual miscellany of verse and prose in various styles and on various themes.
Our Spotlight Poet for Issue 6 will be Ann Drysdale, two of whose poems appear in this issue.
Be sure to read our revised Submission Guidelines (below) carefully before submitting.
E-mail contact:editor@the-chimaera.com
Please read the General Submission Guidelines (below) before you submit. Do not send sound files with submissions; you will have the option of sending them for any accepted poems, after acceptance.
General Submission Guidelines
The detailed version: please read this too
- Submit only once per period.
- Submit either poetry or prose, or both, but please observe the limits set out below unless otherwise invited by the Editor.
- Send up to five poems, or up to three short prose pieces (for example, flash fiction) under 500 words, or one longer prose piece (essay, review or short story 500–4000 words). See under POETRY and PROSE below for more about our interests, and/or read through some of our published issues.
- If you are submitting for the forthcoming issue’s feature theme, note this with your submission.
- 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.
- Please be sure that what you send is checked, proofread, and your final revision. Our proofing stage is for correcting errors, not a last chance for the author to rewrite or tweak. Tweak before you submit.
- The person who submits work must be the author.
- We accept simultaneous submissions, but please inform us immediately if the submission is accepted elsewhere.
- 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.
- Single-space all text, whether poetry or prose, and do not include special formatting (indents, font changes, and so on) except as absolutely necessary to the work. (See below for more on formatting and house style.)
- Do not send sound files with submissions. If we accept your poetry, we will ask if you would like to send a recorded reading. To do so, you’ll need to be able to make a file in .mp3 format. (We have some technical notes available in case you are not used to voice recording.)
- Provide brief biographical details of up to five lines in third-person style, including no more than one web link. Other links to journals etc listed in an author’s or artist’s credits will be at the discretion of the editors.
- Sorry, we can’t pay contributors at present. The Chimaera is a free web-only publication and receives no income.
POETRY: We are interested in all sorts of well-written poetry, including satirical and humorous verse. We are form-friendly: we like poems in form, with or without rhyme, but not exclusively. Shorter poems are more likely to be accepted, but we have no specific length limit.
PROSE: Essays, book reviews, or fiction (complete stories only, not excerpts from novels). We are interested in essays relating to literature, culture, history or general social issues; critical prose, causeries, reminiscences, polemics, historiography, biographies, 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.
Submission methods
All else being equal, we are more likely to accept work that is easier for us to prepare for publication. Submissions that come via our online form are generally the easiest for us to work with. They mean less work for us than the other options, because submissions arrive with minimal formatting codes, etc, compared with text in a Word file or pasted from Word into a formatted email. We prefer that you use the online form when sending up to three poems, and you may also use it for longer submissions.
Text submission methods in order of preference:
- Online submission via our form (best for poems and short prose pieces without complex formatting)
- 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.
Visual art contributions should be in jpeg (.jpg) files sent as attachments. Image submissions should be original work or cite relevant permissions from copyright owners.
If you submit anything by email please note these special requirements:
- Your surname and the word “submission” should be included in the subject line of your email, e.g. “W. H. Auden submission”. If you are submitting to the special feature section, please add its name; so this time it might be “W. H. Auden submission (FORM feature)”.
- Any file attachment should include your surname as the first word of the file name, e.g. Auden_poems.doc. This makes it easier to file and sort submissions.
Response time
Online submissions are acknowledged at once. We will attempt to acknowledge receipt of email submissions within three weeks, and to respond with a decision within six weeks. However, sometimes a decision might be delayed until the end of the current submissions period.
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.