Issue 5
The Queer Issue
Submission Cycle Opens: May 9th - June 9th 2026
** If the $5 submission fee isn’t feasible or reasonable for you, please shoot us an email. We are eager to take a look at your work—thethalweg@gmail.com What we publish:
We are seeking short stories, essays, poetry, prose, the first chapter of your sci-fi novel, photographs, prints, illustrations, comic strips, paintings, or any other printable creative work from rural and wildland queer creatives.
We highly recommend spending some time with our archive or reading our current issue to better understand if your work is a fit for our publication!
We are particularly interested in the following:
Creative work from queer folks who live and work in rural and wild places
Contributors who, in some way/shape/form, make their livings or their lives outside. We love publishing creative work by wilderness guides, ranchers, beekeepers, poets, fisherpeople, photographers, farmers, educators, activists, artists, boaters, caretakers, biologists, ranchers, carpenters, illustrators, climbers, academics, trail crew, and others.
Contributors with a secondary medium who are seeking more opportunities to publish/share a different side of their work—are you a scientific illustrator who also writes poetry? Thrilling—send us your poems!
Collections of work, multimedia or single medium. We love publishing a series of poems by one poet. Have more than one painting or photograph to submit? Do it! We’re interested in the spaces between pieces; the way an artist is in conversation with themselves through their pieces.
Your weirdest stuff. Give us surreal maps. Strange plays. Lyric essays. Nature-based flash horror. High concept visual poems. Sheet music.
With your submission please include a short bio and a sentence or two about how you feel your work resonates with our publication.
After your work is submitted, it will be reviewed by a small team of rotating editors. Contributors will be notified within three months of the submission deadline.
Submission guidelines:
Written work should be submitted as a .doc, docx., or .pdf
Visual work should be submitted as high resolution (300 dpi) JPEGs, PNGs, or TIFF files.
A note on our financial structure and ethos:
After an external editorial selection, each selected contributor will be compensated with a $100 honorarium. We honor the labor and value of art and writing and are grateful to those who entrust us with their work. We are a small, volunteer-run nonprofit and are always exploring ways to increase our honorariums and support artists in our community. Beyond an initial honorarium, there are also opportunities within The Thalweg Wildlands Collective to publish independently with us through the smolt chapbook library, or make some cash on design project through our collaboration projects.