Urban setting. photo by Adelia Ritchie
Call for Submissions
Summer 2024 Salish Magazine, Issue 24:
Nature in the City
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 #24 theme: Nature in the City
The theme for this issue is Nature in the City. Some plants and animals are able to live and even thrive in urban areas. We’d like to focus this issue on life found in Salish Sea regions that are more urban than suburban or rural — places dominated by human activity where you might not expect to find nature unless you know where to look. Potential topic ideas around this theme include:
- Urban waterfronts: our region has several cities with busy waterfront areas. Some cities like Seattle are restoring their waterfront beaches. How do plants and animals use these areas?
- Marine mammals: seals, sea lions, and even whales use the waters near our cities. What are these animals doing there, and what challenges do they face?
- Birds in the city: how do they make a living?
- Street trees: why are they planted, and how do they interact with the environment? Are mycorrhizal networks able to thrive in these environments?
- Special green spaces in the city: profiles of parks, gardens, or other green spaces in an urban setting — what does the place mean to you, what can people learn about interactions among plants, animals, and the environment in this place?
- How are human structures used by plants and animals?
I hope that these suggestions trigger your imagination…
DEADLINES
Here is our general schedule for this Summer 2024 issue (#24):
- April 12: 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.
- May 7: Contributors submit first draft of text and imagery.
- June 1: Contributors submit final revised version, illustrations, and author bio & photo.
- June 21: Initial few articles of Summer 2024 issue are published online. Other articles will be published through the rest of the Summer.
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), Pages (.pages), 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 about 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