Submission Guidelines

Welcome to Vineyard Literary, an online venue for excellent fiction, poetry, and artwork. When submitting to us, consider the initial connotations of a vineyard: the rolling fields, vines, the golden sun, grapes distilled to wine of all kinds—salted, dry, sweet, peppered—and the delicious food pairings that wine can have. Consider the pound of cool rain, the drip of sweat and powder of dry dirt beneath bare feet, and restaurants with glitzy patios, humans joining together for tastings, clinking glasses, laughter.

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Then consider the darker connotations. Crushing and barreling. Pretention, snobbery, people drinking entire dollar bottles from plastic cups alone, the implications if grapes had voices and could scream. Consider what lurks in the silent fields at night, or the vintage labels only available to millionaires and politicians, and what those bottles would witness from their shelves.

After that, consider what we haven’t considered. For everything we’ve said above, there’s infinite connotations and moments that went unsaid, unwitnessed, untasted. Give us those, too.

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Most of all, Vineyard just wants to get drunk on good story.

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Though we mostly publish literary fiction, we also love magical realism, absurdist writing, and surrealist writing. Really, we’re most looking for well thought out, emotionally moving narratives. The best way to know that means is to taste test our previously published writing. Once you’ve done so, submit us on Submittable.

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We publish three online issues per year as well as one print anthology. Submissions are accepted only through Submittable. We’re aiming for a one-to-five-month response time, but like other literary venues we’re run by a small, volunteer staff, and may take longer. If you’re still in progress, we’re still considering your work, so please don’t reach out. Also, like other literary venues, if you’d prefer not to wait in the typical queue, we offer a week response option. For print, we pay a copy of the anthology. Contest payments vary. We encourage you to submit the same work to different projects—occasionally, something we didn’t find was the right fit for our online issue might work well in our print anthology. 

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If you’ve read all of our guidelines, and you still have a question, please reach out through Submittable or send us an email at vineyardliterary@gmail.com.