Welcome to JABBER, a journal dedicated to publishing whatever we like.

That might include conventional fiction, essays, and poetry, but the word “conventional” offers plenty of subjectivity, doesn’t it? Which is why a “This is what we’re looking for” statement seems futile, though you may be wondering what exactly we’re looking for.

Some thoughts on that.

Submission Guidelines:

Fiction/essays should be capped at 3,000 words. This is our estimation. If your story or essay goes over slightly, let us know when submitting. We may still be up for it. Our eyes are strained, so please DOUBLE SPACE YOUR DOCUMENT.

No more than five pages of poetry at a time (SINGLE-SPACED). That means either one five-page poem or five one-page poems or something in between. Again, this is a rule we might break, so if you think we ought to break it in your case, ask first and submit after.

Please send all written work in doc or docx format attached to an email that has your name and a quick 100-word bio written in the third person POV. You’re free to tell us about the submission, but you need not pitch us a typical query letter.

Our email: jabberthemag@gmail.com 

JABBER is updated when we have enough material. We’re not looking to accept work we don’t love simply to have new content and adhere to some rigid schedule. As a result, we do not think in editions; our journal is rolling with new work as we get and accept it. Like us on social media (@jabberthemag) or subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

Fiction

Fiction can run the gamut from the Raymond Carver stuff you were trained to write while getting your MFA to something more experimental. Do as you like, just do it to the best of your ability and we’ll give it a looksee. The fiction editor tends to reward ambition and loves reading something he’s never seen before. Or something he’s seen before done differently. His favorite writers are oddballs like Cesar Aira, Mikhail Bulgakov, Daniil Kharms, Lucy Ellmann, Kurt Vonnegut, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Aglaja Veteranyi, along with the highfalutin’ canonized names: Joyce, Kafka, Woolf, and Faulkner. He was once known to say “If it’s not by Melville, what’s the point?” but has since grown out of that stage. Still, if asked, he’d rate Bartleby the Scrivener as the highest achievement of any American writer. He’s also deeply in love with the work of Lydia Davis and Ali Smith, but he recognizes that no one else could ever be Lydia Davis or Ali Smith save for Lydia Davis or Ali Smith. So don’t try to be them. Be yourself as they are themselves.  

Essays

Essays can be anything as well. We’re interested in the essay as an opportunity for play, rumination, or grappling with an idea that may never be cleanly understood. Example: “Playfulnessness: A Note” by Brian Doyle (which you can read here) is a spirited exploration of the essay as the most free and vital piece of writing one can compose. It makes an argument without being academic; it’s the sort of essay we wish academics would write. It maintains a consistent idea while going all over the damn place, and is less concerned with winning a debate (in the bombastic cable news fashion of our era) than it is with wrestling with what it means to write an essay. It has it all!

For the stranger side of things, check out Artuad, if you haven’t already. Strong stuff, maybe even a dash unpleasant, but the extremity of language/image doesn’t cloud what are some fascinating insights into what it must have been like to be that guy. His look at Van Gogh remains a favorite around here, not just because of the surrealism. 

We might get a little uppity and suggest (re?)reading Montaigne and asking yourself if what he got up to was what one expects from an essay. Would he find a publisher today? Does he land on solid ground? Did he care about absolute proof or were his writings meant to serve as discovery through writing, to add some skepticism to conventional (there’s that word again) thought and question the idea of certainty?

In short: if you feel you’re 100% correct about something and HAVE to share your views with the unenlightened, chances are you’re not for us. We’re not looking for political rants or diatribes. Save that for Twitter. We’d prefer speculation, inquiry, curiosity, self-examination, social commentary that stays away from preaching, the idiosyncratic, the unusual, even the hot take. 

(Buuuuut… have you read Lucy Ellmann’s book Things Are Against Us? We love it, even though it sort of breaks our rules. So yeah, who can tell?)

Poetry

Poetry is lovely, ugly, compelling, all of that and more. The poetry editor has strong feelings, though lacks the ability to articulate what a “good” or “bad” poem looks like. Best to name names: Frank O’Hara, Ciaran Carson, Cesar Vallejo, Leontia Flynn, Guillaume Apollinaire, Nicanor Parra, Vicente Huidobro, Walt Whitman, Medbh McGuckian, Forough Farrokhzad, Paul Muldoon, Maggie Smith, James Fenton, Joyce Mansour, U. A. Fanthrope, Philip Larkin, and Louis MacNeice have all written something that has reminded the editor that poetry is the highest form of writing. If you’re familiar with even a few of these names, you’ll see that there’s a wide variety here. So again, less of a “This is what you must do” dictum and more an “Anything goes” attitude. We promise each poem submitted will be carefully read. We can’t begin to explain why we like what we like. 

Other Media

JABBER also accepts visual art (painting/photography). And music, though make sure the compositions are recorded in a format that we can reproduce (MP3s). We’re not looking for songs per se, but sounds. We dig noisy stuff from the likes of Merzbow and Puce Mary as well minimalist oddities and soundscapes. We’re not Pitchfork—we wouldn’t know how to promote your demo and we’re not going to critique your work. But we like making space for less (here it comes again) conventional compositions.