How to Submit Your Writing in the Berlin Literary Scene

Lit. editor Ceri Savage thinks submitting to literary journals is a rejection-lined bureaucratic hellscape. Here's why she still thinks you should go for it.

You’d think writing would be the hard part, but putting your work out there can take even more commitment than tackling the blank page. Whether a single poem or an entire collection, getting published is a rocky road. I’d go so far to say it’s a bureaucratic, rejection-lined hellscape and any artist’s worst nightmare. But even then, I still think you should go for it. Not every writer wants to publish and not every poem needs to be shared (no one wants a screenshot of your unedited 4am Notes app), but what’s the point of crafting these precious inclinations of the human heart if they’re just going to sit on your laptop?

By submitting to literary journals, you don’t need to wait until you’ve written a whole book. Writing one poem is challenge enough – an outpouring followed by testing if it reads better in three stanzas or four, whether it works better in a Fibonacci sequence or as a splatter of edgy line breaks. It’s architecture. It takes time. Writing a whole collection could take years, if it even happens at all. The good news is that countless literary journals, magazines, newspapers, anthologies and competitions would be thrilled to accept your one precious poem. 

There are tens of thousands of literary journals. Most of them accept not only poems but short stories, flash fiction, essays or novel excerpts. I’d begin with approachable ones – online-only or ones with small circulations – then slowly work your way up to the big guns: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic. It’s easy to get sucked into the North American scene, but you’ll find fantastic publications, big and small, all over the world, and the local ones are well worth supporting. In Berlin alone, you’ve got so many options: FU Review, berlin lit, The Berlin Literary Review, SAND Journal, first page, Sad Girl Press, DADDY, Berlin Quarterly, Anodyne Magazine, Erotic Review… there are honestly too many to name. I’m also throwing The Berliner into the mix since we started our new ‘Poem of the Month’ in the Literature section.

To read the full article on the-berliner.com, click here