Submissions

The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts is looking for, as you might guess, “compressed creative arts.” We accept fiction and creative nonfiction, as long as they are compressed in some way. Work is published weekly, without labels, and the labels here only exist to help us determine its best readers. Our response time is generally 1-5 days. Also, our acceptance rate is currently about 2% of submissions. We pay writers $50 per accepted piece and signed contract.

Submissions are open from March 15 to June 15 and September 15 to December 15.

If you’ve been previously published by the press, please wait a year until submitting again. Thanks.

Here are a dozen things Matter Press definitely doesn’t want:

conversations in bars, cafes, restaurants, cars, hikes, or in some unexplained space where disembodied voices think they are way more interesting and clever than they are
anything written “after.” Nothing in conversation with, inspired by, or an homage to a preceding poem, artwork, or other text. Before is okay.
line break poetry or poetry written as prose with / between the lines where the line break would be
Pieces “after” the action, so that the protagonist does nothing except moments of glancing, thinking, reflecting, noticing, sitting, wondering, brushing, dreaming…
odd names of characters like Friglep or Zueron or Noir or anything that isn’t a name
a strange writing pseudonym that is a bunch of senseless letters strung together
the heading on a piece that still has the name of the writing teacher, English teacher, professor—along with the name of the class
yeah, the world is awful, the president is awful, the climate is awful, ICE is awful. It’s all awful. We know. No need to tell us. We 100% get it.
second-person stories. You can send such a story to your other favorite literary magazines; you do not need to send it here.
pieces that assume we will automatically care about your piece because you wrote it. We won’t. The piece needs to make us care. And pretty quickly. There are 100s of pieces in the slush pile. We aren’t a writing workshop that has no choice but to read each piece carefully and closely and lovingly because everyone knows everyone. We have choices. Hundreds of them.
the appearance of Jesus, God, or any holy being
any questions about the above

The reader for your submission is, during this round of submissions, the managing editor.

Please be sure to submit in the correct category; we’ve been receiving several fiction submissions in the creative nonfiction category. For all submitters, we aren’t as concerned with labels—hint fiction, prose poetry, micro fiction, flash fiction, and so on—as we are with what compression means to you. In other words, what form “compression” takes in each artist’s work will be up to each individual. However, we don’t publish erotica or work with strong, graphic sexual content. In short, we want to fall in love with your work. That might happen in the way we’ve fallen in love with work we’ve previously published, or it might happen in a way we have yet to experience. Maybe reading that other work will help in knowing whether you should send your work to us, but in truth, such a thing might not be discoverable. Here are things that matter:

Please do not include a cover letter as part of the manuscript document.
Please include, as part of your cover letter on Submittable, a brief bio. Also, in the cover letter, let us know why you feel this piece works for a journal obsessed with “compression.”
Please no more than one submission of a single piece in each genre at a time. Please feel free to submit again after receiving a response, but please no more than 3 submissions per genre per reading period.
Simultaneous submissions are fine with us, but please let us know if the submission has been accepted elsewhere. Failure to do will result in some facsimile of your face being put on the Matter dart board. And no one wants that.
Please format prose to be singled-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, in a Microsoft Word document, with an extra space between each paragraph.
If you’ve been previously published by The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, please wait a year before submitting again.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Upcoming:

09/15 • Abbie Doll
09/22 • Karen Regen Tuero
09/29 • Amy Speace
10/06 • Jennifer Edwards
10/13 • Joseph O’Day
10/20 • Carolyn Zaikowski
10/27 • Sunmisola Odusola
11/03 • Sara Cassidy
11/10 • Liz Abrams-Morley
11/17 • Alison Colwell
11/24 • Lucy Zhang
12/01 • TBD
12/08 • TBD
12/15 • TBD
12/22 • TBD
12/29 • TBD