Osprey carrying a stick back to its next. photo by John F. Williams
Call for Submissions
Autumn 2024 Salish Magazine, Issue 25:
Relationships
We are currently seeking articles, poetry, art, audio, photos, and videos related to this theme and connected to the Salish Sea region (see map photo below).
We’re inviting a submission from you!
Salish Magazine tells stories related to things that people can see/hear firsthand, outdoors in our Salish Sea region. It ties specific nature topics into the larger ecosystem, and it includes lots of visuals and audio. Whether you’re an aspiring or seasoned journalist, artist, scientist, storyteller, poet, musician, or photographer, we’d love to hear from you.
Issue #25 theme: Relationships
For this issue, we’d like contributors to focus on relationships found in the greater Salish Sea ecosystem. A few examples:
- mutually beneficial relationships, with all organisms benefiting
- predatory relationships, with organisms using other organisms for food
- parasitic relationships, with an organism benefiting while causing harm to others
- competitive relationships
- relationships with one or more non-living things
- feedback loops
Your submission could focus on a different kind of relationship, or multiple relationships acting at once.
There are many possible examples, but here are a few:
- the osprey above carrying a stick to its nest
- fallen logs and the life they support
- big-leaf maple trees as a habitat for licorice fern and mosses
- how salmon support forest health and vice versa
- dwarf mistletoe parasitism and its impact on forests
- rocks serving as attaching points for barnacles and lichen
- pollination
- native and non-native plants competing for resources
- decomposers
Since Salish Magazine strives to provide an ecosystem perspective and not just concentrate on a single subject, we ask that contributors try to focus on relationships between more than two biotic or abiotic elements or how a relationship between two elements impacts others. For example, salmon bring nutrients from the Pacific Ocean into the streams, and then those nutrients are scattered through the forest by those who consume the salmon.
We hope that these suggestions trigger your imagination…
DEADLINES
Here is our general schedule for this Autumn 2024 issue:
- July 7: Brief proposals due from contributors (this can be just a few sentences in a simple email). It will be helpful if you indicate the sources of information you intend to use as well as your experience/credentials.
- August 1: Contributors submit first draft of text and imagery.
- September 1: Contributors submit final revised version, illustrations, and author bio & photo.
- September 21: Initial few articles of Autumn 2024 issue are published online. Other articles will be published through the rest of the Autumn.
CONTACT
Please email submissions@salishmagazine.org to submit a proposal or if you have questions.
PROCEDURAL DETAILS
Once we receive and process all the proposals, we will have some flexibility with the draft-submission dates and will be happy to work with you to find dates that work for both you and us. Also, we will then know where there are gaps or overlaps in submissions and so suggest changes for the first draft.
The first draft will also allow us to see what additional illustrations might be necessary, and we will issue a specific call for visuals. After receiving the first drafts, we will assign an editor to work with you as you create the final draft.
We have some flexibility and can work with you on due dates after we receive the first drafts.
Please see our Style Guide for details:
https://salishmagazine.org/style-guide/
Below is a brief summary.
FORMAT AND STYLE
- Prose articles should be around 1,000 to 2,000 words.
- For poetry submissions we haven’t set a guideline for the number of words, as poems tend to be shorter than articles.
- Please provide text files for poems or articles as a Word (.docx) or text (.txt) file.
- Please provide photographs/illustrations in high-resolution .jpg (at least 2048 pixels across). It would be best if the images contain some extra space around the subject so that we have some choices for cropping it to fit with the text layout. We like articles to be highly visual, and we usually can add photos if necessary.
- Videos, songs, or other cultural interpretations are also welcome; ask us about formatting requirements.
- We can send you a link to an online drive for uploading files if you have some that are too big to email.
- More details about the writing style, topic formulation, and geographic scope can be found in our online Style Guide For Authors.
Salish Magazine is a quarterly, advertisement free, online publication that reveals the interconnectedness of our natural world through…
visually rich stories…
about outdoor features…
in our Salish Sea region.
Salish Magazine strives to tell stories related to what people can see, or see at least parts or traces of, preferably in public forests and beaches around our Salish Sea region. We hope that when our readers personally encounter those sights, the stories they have read in Salish Magazine will come to mind, enabling them to see their surroundings in a new context — one that expands their knowledge of our Salish Sea ecosystem.
Articles should be easy to read for people who don’t know much about the subject and be more fun than academic — written as if you have a big smile on your face and want to share your ideas with a bunch of fun people. If you’re more of a technical writer, we can help edit your work for our target audience. We welcome visual illustrations, and we have access to photographers and artists who can provide additional illustrations.
We are also trying to offer an alternative to the overwhelmingly people-centric media by not having people be the focus of our stories. We’ll leave the environmental policy, advocacy, agency projects, human benefits, and “how to” topics to other publishers.
You can read more about our style recommendations at:
https://salishmagazine.org/style-guide/
BIO
We publish a short bio & photo of content contributors. Here are our bio guidelines:
For our readers, would you please submit a bio of fewer than 100 words that references your experiences relevant to your contribution. It should be written in the third person. We would be happy to include a photograph of you, if you desire.
We would also be happy to include a relevant link to your web page, blog, or other reference that will help people find out more about you. We do not want to include advertisements.
PAYMENT
At this time, we don’t provide payment for submissions.
PAST ISSUES
Please look at past issues (at: salishmagazine.org) to familiarize yourself with the kinds of articles that we publish.
CONTACT
Please email submissions@salishmagazine.org to submit a proposal or if you have questions.
Thank you for being part of Salish Magazine,
John F. Williams, Publisher