Stir Your Batter and Grease Your Tins - It’s Almost Time for Blended & Beyond Submissions

In June, jmww’s Blened & Beyond series published its sixth quarterly volume. That’s a year and a half of being stunned at the quantity and quality of submissions I’ve had the honor of reading as Senior Editor. We can only choose a handful of pieces for each volume—a challenging and exciting curation process.

We have been fortunate to publish works by Ann Pedone, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Mikki Aronoff, Diane Wald, Benjamin Niespodziany, and Gayle Brandeis. We have published wonderful creatives who are early in their career, established in their career, and we’ve even nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Thank you, thank you, thank you all!

In advance of our Volume 7 call for submissions, we want more of the same. Which is to say, more work that is so distinctly different from one another, there is no sameness whatsoever. The writers, artists, and undefined creatives who contribute to Blended & Beyond have embraced the spirit of our name. Beyond that, they have defined and redefined every volume. We don’t even know what we are anymore, and that was our mission at the outset.

If your work writes with a brush or paints with a pen, please ready your submission. If your work blends two or more genres or you can’t even get it to fit one genre, please ready your submission. If you’re a student whose teacher says, “Oh my. What are we ever going to do with you?” please ready your submission. If you’re incarcerated, marginalized, queer, weird, young, old, or so brilliantly beyond I might need calming agents or a platter of aged cheeses, I absolutely must see your submission.

When will that call for submissions open? I don’t know. But you definitely have a few weeks to put something together, and a few more weeks after that before the window closes. Volume 7 will publish in September. I post announcements and updates on my Instagram and Threads. The full call for submissions will be posted at jmwwblog.wordpress.com. Calls for submissions are also announced on X/Twitter at @jmwwjournal and on Instagram at @jmwwlitjournal. Reading periods for all jmww categories can be found on Submittable, where our submissions are free. All Blended & Beyond contributors are selected from our Submittable reading period.

This announcement has been a pre-call for submissions and a thank you to all submitters, contributors, and readers. —Bradley David