Submission Guidelines

A Quarterly of light and occasional verse, squibs, satire, puns, cartoons, and word-play.

Guidelines for contributors:

NO HALLMARKS-unless stamped out of the same aery yet durable material as that of Rochester, Swift, Pope, Calverley, Byron, Praed, W. S. Gilbert, Beerbohm, Belloc, Shaw, Chesterton, Benchley, Coward, Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash. LIGHT seeks to continue the tradition established by the Punch of the eighteen-nineties, the Vanity Fair of the twenties, and the New Yorker of Ross and Shawn, of De Vries and Nabokov, of Thurber and E. B. White. Slang and superciliousness, epigrams and aphorisms, parodies and satire, cartoons and line drawings, nonsense and spoonerisms and absurdist clippings from the daily press: If it has wit, point, edge or barb, it will find a home here. Verse written for an occasion, private or public, is particularly welcome.

Reviews and essays are encouraged, in the spirit (if not the words) of Stevenson, Beerbohm, Chesterton. Any topic, from Light Verse or its antecedents to ephemeral or everyday objects, may suit; in lengths from brief apéritifs to lengthy meditations. Write with proposals or for further details.

Please be neat, submit letter-quality typescripts or clean photocopies, and a stamped self-addressed business (# 10) or manila-sized envelope (no post cards). Submissions that do not have sufficient postage for their return will be destroyed unread. There should be only one poem on each page, and each page should have your name and address on it. Works that extend over several pages should be numbered, with your name on each page. Submissions of more than one page should be folded once; that is, do not fold each sheet of paper separately. Submit groups of 1-6 poems; larger submissions are discouraged. Payment is in copies (two for domestic contributors, one for foreign) of the issue your original contribution appears in. International submissions should include sufficient U.S. postage for their return. Please allow up to four months for our response.

Cartoons and line drawings are also solicited, from those solicitous of the honorable and corrosive tradition laid down by Rowlandson, Daumier, Hogarth, Lear, Steinberg, Beerbohm, and Thurber; or continued in the acid-dropping work of Trudeau, Larsen, L. J. Barry, R. Crumb, Robt. Williams, and S. Clay Wilson. The dimensions of your work should normally be no larger than 6" by 4". Line drawings only; no washes or half-tones. Do not send your originals. Send only clean photocopies on good heavy-weight white paper with a 94 brightness or higher. Hammermill Laser Print #004640-4 is recommended. Submissions should be in black and white.

Send contributions, queries, subscriptions, correspondence via postal mail to:
LIGHT
The Editors
PO Box 7500
Chicago, Illinois 60680

For those wishing to submit work(s) for consideration via email, we are no longer able to recieve submissions in this manner. Please send your work to the PO Box above, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope so we can return your pieces to you.

Last update: 25 March, 2009