Call for Submissions
Autonomous Press is seeking submissions of short fiction, poetry, and short memoir for our upcoming anthology, Spoon Knife 3: Incursions.
Spoon Knife 3: Incursions will be published in Spring 2018. It will be the third volume of our annual literary anthology, following The Spoon Knife Anthology: Tales of Compliance, Defiance, and Resistance (Spring 2016) and Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber (Spring 2017).
The Spoon Knife anthology series is published under Autonomous Press’ NeuroQueer Books imprint. All submissions should in some way touch upon or be relevant to the themes of neurodivergence, queerness, and/or the intersections of neurodivergence and queerness. These themes can be engaged with either directly or through metaphor.
For Spoon Knife 3: Incursions, we’re looking for pieces that focus on the theme of incursions by one reality into another.
Authors are encouraged to interpret this theme broadly and creatively. An incursion from another reality could mean a great many things, including but definitely not limited to:
• Experiences such as hearing voices, hallucinations, visions, or so-called “psychotic breaks.”
• Possession or visitation by spirits, ghosts, angels, demons, gods, or other otherworldly presences.
• People or things (like artifacts or creatures) showing up from another world in the literal sense – from alternate universes, for instance.
• People or things showing up from another world in the more figurative sense – for instance, the impact a visitor from a foreign culture has on a relatively homogeneous community, or the impact a forbidden book has on a sheltered mind.
And these are just a few examples of the vast array of possible interpretations.
The Editors
Every volume of Spoon Knife has a different team of co-editors. The editors for Spoon Knife 3: Incursions are Nick Walker and Andrew M. Reichart.
Nick Walker is an autistic genderqueer author, educator, and aikido teacher, and one of the founding editors of Autonomous Press. He is a faculty member at California Institute of Integral Studies and Sofia University, and senior instructor of the Aikido Shusekai dojo in Berkeley, California.
Andrew M. Reichart writes books, stories, and comics that blur the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. New editions of his books are forthcoming from Autonomous Press, starting in 2017. He lives in California with his wife and a couple of dogs.
Format and Length
Fiction and memoir pieces must meet the following criteria:
• 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced.
• Indent the first line of each paragraph, and do not put blank lines between paragraphs.
• Make the first page a cover page with title and author contact info.
• Author’s name and page number in the top right corner of every page
• Use Oxford commas.
• The entire manuscript should be thoroughly and carefully spell-checked and proofread (we recommend it be reviewed multiple times, by the author and by at least two other readers who have a sharp critical eye for detail, punctuation, grammar, and clarity of writing).
We will not accept manuscripts that do not meet all of these criteria, or that contain multiple spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation errors.
Fiction and memoir pieces should be 10,000 words or less. If you’re an author whom we’ve previously published or whose submission the editors have specifically solicited, and you need more than 10,000 words to tell your story properly, we may be able to make an exception about the word limit for you – please contact the editors about it.
If you’re submitting poetry, you may submit up to 5 poems of any length and style, provided all the poems are consistent with the theme of the anthology. Poems should also have the author’s name in the header of each page, as well as a cover page with author contact info. Poetry does not need to be double-spaced.
All submissions must be in .doc or .docx format, or in a fully Word-compatible file format like .odt or .rtf.
When and How to Submit
We are accepting submissions now. All submissions are due by Saturday, September 30, 2017.
Authors will be notified of their acceptance or rejection no later than November 1, 2017.
Payment for accepted submissions will be 1 cent per word, to be sent by check during the first quarter of 2018.
Email all submissions to nick@autpress.com.
The title of your email must be either “Spoon Knife 3 Submission – Fiction,” “Spoon Knife 3 Submission – Memoir,” or “Spoon Knife 3 Submission – Poetry.” Using one of these three email titles ensures that your submission will end up in the right place.
Please include a cover letter that makes it clear exactly what name you wish to be credited under, and that gives a 3-4 sentence bio written in the third person. The name and bio should be typed exactly as you want them to appear in the book.