Darner dragonfly. photo by John F. Williams
Call for Submissions
Winter 2024 Salish Magazine, Issue 26:
In the Air
We are currently seeking articles, poetry, art, audio, photos, and videos related to “In the Air” 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 #26 theme: In the Air
This issue will focus on how the movement of living things through the air contributes to and influences ecosystems of the Salish Sea region. Here are some example topics — feel free to build from these or propose your own:
- How birds transport other living things to new places (e.g., when they eat berries and carry/deposit seeds somewhere else)
- Plants and fungi with special air-borne dispersal techniques for seeds, pollen, spores (e.g., fungi that throw out spores at high speed, plans with “spring loaded” seed pods, big-leaf maple “helicopters”)
- Aerial swarms for species to spread and/or for reproduction (e.g., termites, mayflies)
- Lesser known aerial migrations (e.g., dragonflies, native bats)
- Creatures that jump; how and why (e.g., grasshoppers, springtails, some beetles)
- How baby spiders use silk to fly (“ballooning”)
- How trees interact with and are influenced by wind and the atmosphere
- ***What about local marine creatures? Do they do something in the air or analogous to that?
Salish Magazine strives to provide an ecosystem perspective and not just concentrate on a single subject. So we ask that contributors try to tell stories of how the interconnections between things are an essential part of the big picture.
We hope that those suggestions trigger your imagination…
DEADLINES
Here is our general schedule for this Winter 2024 issue:
- December through mid-January: Please submit a first draft. Our editors will work contributors to arrive at a final revised version, illustrations, and author bio & photo.
- March 20: All finalized submissions will be published by the end of Winter.
CONTACT
Please email submissions@salishmagazine.org to submit a proposal or if you have questions.
PROCEDURAL DETAILS
The first draft will also allow us to see what additional illustrations might be necessary, and we will issue a specific call for visuals if necessary. After receiving the first drafts, we will assign an editor to work with you as you create the final draft.
Please see our Style Guide for details about the style we aspire toward:
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.
- Please provide text files for poems or articles as Microsoft Word (.docx), Apple Pages (.pages) or generic text (.txt) file.
- If you are submitting imagery, 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. We’d like our content to tell our readers how nature works, and what they can see/experience exploring nature.
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 200 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