Submission Guidelines
General Guidelines
- We strongly urge you to read our “About Us” link before submitting your work.
- We accept fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art.
- We accept only electronic submissions to our managing editor at the email address below. Send us a cover letter in the body of your email. Include the writer’s name and email address. The writer’s name and email address should also appear on the first page of the manuscript.
- Send your work as a Word attachment. Do not submit your work in the body of the email.
- You may submit work in more than one genre, but send them in separate cover letter emails with separate attachments.
- Fiction and essay submissions should be double-spaced and limited to 5000 words. Poetry should be single-spaced and limited to 1-3 poems.
- We accept simultaneous submissions but wish to be told that your submission is such in the cover letter. If the manuscript is accepted elsewhere, we require immediate notification by email.
- We do not accept previously published works except by special arrangement.
- At present we are unable to offer any payment to contributors.
- By submitting your work to The Christendom Review, you grant The Christendom Review exclusive electronic rights to your work for a period of 90 days should your work be accepted. You also grant The Christendom Review a non-exclusive right to maintain a copy of published work in our electronic archives indefinitely and to include your work in a PDF print version of the issue in which it appears, available for sale online at Lulu.com and other outlets.
- “Exclusive electronic rights” means that you agree not to re-publish your work elsewhere online while the issue featuring your work is current. “Publish” means any public display of your work including your personal website and posting to message boards. You are welcome to link to the page featuring your work instead. Once the issue has been archived you are free to re-publish your work online.
- By submitting your work to The Christendom Review, you attest that your submission is your own, original work. All other rights revert to the author. If you reprint the work elsewhere, we request that you cite The Christendom Review as the original publisher.
Fiction Submissions
- We prefer stories in which plot is a result of the tension between character(s) and circumstance.
- We prefer the action to be rendered in scene and panoramic summary rather than reported.
- We prefer the choral effect to the didactic narrator.
- We prefer stories that observe strict adherence to the chosen point of view (e.g. first-person/third- person/central-intelligence).
- We prefer stories with a conflict and a resolution. We do not encourage submission of “flash fiction” unless you can approach the subtle intensity of Katherine Ann Porter’s “Magic” or Guy De Maupassant’s “Love: Three Pages from a Sportsman’s Notebook.”
- Fiction submissions should be free of emotion, sex, or violence that is gratuitous. We concur with the ancient Greek dramatists that “obscene” means “off-stage.” We don’t care for nihilism as the basis of artistic vision. Neither do we care for sentimental Christian stories.
- While we believe in grace, we don’t subscribe to cheap grace in the form of forced or contrived endings; however, we do agree with Flannery O’Connor that evil may be rendered so as to be plausibly in the service of grace.
- We accept chapters from novels so long as they contain an entire and complete action.
- We encourage fiction that is located. (No professional Southerners, please.)
- We are more interested in the quality and vision that informs the writing than in your publishing credentials.
Poetry Submissions
- While we admire narrative poetry, we prefer an unobtrusive, subtle, and controlled use of the first-person voice; we believe the felt experience of the poem to be more important than the personality of the poet. We invite metered, even rhyming verse, provided the end-line rhyme is not forced. We love a good sonnet. We like dramatic monologues. In other words, we prefer formal poetry that is neither too private nor too public in meaning.
Essay Submissions
- We accept thoughtful, possibly humorous critiques of some aspect of modernity, in the tradition of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesteron, Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy, Andrew Lytle, Richard Weaver, Peter Kreeft, and Marion Montgomery; however, non-fiction essays that have a strong sense of story-telling are considered as well.
Visual Arts Submissions
- These should be limited to two images per submission.
- We prefer art work that is comprehensible, beautiful and observant of Natural Law as revealed in creation. We are not interested in private or prurient views of reality.
- Images should be submitted in both print and web-ready versions.
- The print version should ideally use a 300ppi resolution and not exceed 6" by 6" (1800x1800 pixels). 150ppi is acceptable but should not exceed 900x900 pixels. Print-ready versions should be submitted in a lossless format, preferably tiff with any mode of data compression. File size is not important.
- Web-ready versions should have an sRGB colorspace at 72ppi and should not exceed 800x800 pixels. High quality jpegs are preferred with a file size not exceeding 1MB.
- Items submitted and accepted outside of these guidelines are subject to resizing and modifying as necessary only to suit the publishing needs of this website.
Email submissions@christendomreview.com to submit an article for an upcoming issue.