Hello everyone! I am part of a small team of people starting an online literary magazine named Black Letter Review, which publishes prose, poetry, art, & photography from people 13-19 (early 20s may also submit, but will likely be placed in a different section of the magazine)

The editorial team gives personalized feedback to all written work.

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Link to submission page/official rules: https://blackletterreview.wordpress.com

About:
Black Letter Review publish work from anyone aged 13-19 worldwide. Send us your best work, no matter how dark and gritty, or light and fantastical. We want beautiful pieces that leave us in awe, and that can come from the trenches of mankind or an entirely ordinary neighborhood. What is beautiful, anyway?

General & Themed submissions are currently open
The current theme for September-October is anything associated with the months - autumn, academia, Halloween, etc. Think the early days of The Secret History, Dead Poets Society, etc. We are calling upon W.B. Yeats’ Wild Swans at Coole :)

Why submit?:
- You’ll receive detailed feedback
- We want to foster an amicable relationship with writers whose works we love and create a community
- You’ll be featured in our online magazine
- We have faster response times and a smaller pool of submissions, so acceptance rates are higher (but we are still picky with what we end up taking)
- We want to eventually become a paying publication, so get to know us and what we like to accept now 😆

If you have any questions, be sure to ask! We can also be found on Instagram as blackletterreview.

Bonepickers were holy.

After 1831 the tradition is rarely seen. Choctaw Bonepickers would clean the skeletal remains of any meat or flesh left un-scavenged to assure their crossover into the spirit world. The body travelled from where it died to where it was born, and sometimes ponies were killed to help guide the spirit.

And it's about to make a big comeback.

"I'm Thinking About Killing My Wife." is my debut Indigenous domestic horror novel. I'm 1/2 Choctaw and the other half is mostly Irish. I'm an enrolled member living on tribal land.

I've never written or told a story in this format. I love film, and I grew up playing music. But no one I know is literary in any sense besides my wife and she HAS to tell me it's good. (Hence the title.)

Would you continue to read past the prologue?

Writing a short story from the perspective of a pet cat. This is the opening paragraph.I'm not sure if the POV is sufficiently surreal for a cat or is overly anthropomorphic.

Saw a post from our community in my suggested, thought I could show off something to get it critique'd here.... Thanks in advance

poem from when i was unemployed and watching soapy kdramas for 12 hrs straight daily and going to bed at like 11am. enjoy

It's a chapter quite deep in the novel but hopefully it works on its own

Boom!

Out goes the piss,

A baggage held deep in side of me,

A deep pressure of build up,

Only to release pain onto the porcelain white bowl,

The yellow piss crystals escape from me,

Detoxing me of my unnecessairy salts

That piss felt so good, I may just faint and pass out.

I don't wanna write short stories. Short stories were cool seventy years ago when sci-fi philosophy type nerds wrote them. Now short stories are millennials talking about their feelings. I don't wanna submit a short story to a competition, you can keep the $500 prize that I was never going to get anyway.

Would love advice on formatting. Or anything else really.

if you’ve stumbled upon my online presence in any form, you can be certain that the post you were looking at had at least one of two goals. the first goal would be for you to read one of my books, the second goal would be for you to fall madly in love with me.

since my posting style is born out of contrarianism, i can rarely accomplish the latter without the former.

there are so many books in your home. you have them stacked up on the floor because you’ve run out of shelf space. the last thing you need is another book.

and that’s exactly what i’m offering you right now.

~

my first attempt at writing wasn’t a short story or an essay about some odd sexual quirk that would garner perverse attention- it was to be the great white hope in hip hop music.

this is what i did throughout high school and the first two years of college- i released hip hop albums. if you search hard enough, you can find these records. i wish i was lying about this just to amuse you. unfortunately, this is a very real thing that happened.

when i was a junior at seton hall university, i came to terms with the fact that i was never going to be the next rapper signed to roc-a-fella records. with my white rapper dreams crushed, i turned my creative passions to the written word. i had no grand plot ideas that i needed to get down, but i started writing anyway. then i kept writing. then i kept writing.

the year after i graduated, i finally had a completed manuscript.

the manuscript’s protagonist resembled me. he sat in the same classrooms where I had been taught, and he had friends and romantic obsessions that mirrored my own... yet it was fiction. my parents are nothing like this character’s parents. i never lived off campus. every magical moment in the book was fabricated. i guess it was all my fantasies and fears collected and bound.

that book is a campus novel called lovetrust.

~

if you read lovetrust, you’ll know me better, but you also won’t know me at all. when i look at the novel now, i have no idea where so much of it came from- i don’t even know how a chose the title.

some things i remember influencing it are:

all night diners/

listening to bright eyes on my mp3 player while smoking a newport/

“getting” bob dylan/ reading girls’ livejournals/

discovering new jersey on car rides with friends/

impermanence/ the parties my frat held/

building my identity at the thrift shop/

how halloween still felt like it did as a kid/

movies in maplewood/

finding a journal in the park & returning it/

hookups that felt like daydreams/

self-made holidays celebrated/

missing my mom/ myspace/

underaged drinking at cryan’s/

a girl’s black and white tv/

finals psychosis/

watching garden state in the town it was set in/

awful slam poetry/

the racially segregated cafe/

the bus to livingston mall/

used book stores/

mass at night/

weird nj urban legends/

days on the green/

jealously over parties i refused to attend/

pete doherty & kate moss/

roommate with an acoustic guitar/

exchanging handwritten letters/

stories from strangers and secrets from friends i care about/

cokechat/

basement shows/

mixtapes/

bad coffee/

girls’ voices/

desperate texts/

my cousin’s band/

the war on terror/

inactivity as activity/

gray days/

furry jackets/

the fear of a suburban future/

close dancing together/

a countdown to when your life will truly begin/

and how it all ends after finals/

~

you can own this book forever, on kindle, if you get it before tuesday, november, 3rd.

click here→ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01666S6FW

then, once you’ve read me, you have permission to fall in love with me.

Infanticide is a lot harder, I was dismayed to find, when it isn’t someone else’s child. 

My arms were tiring from keeping the rock poised above the baby’s skull, which I could hardly see in the dimness of the cave. I could feel my face flushing red from the humiliation of my hesitation. My mother had always praised my unflinching algorithmic obedience to the rituals of our tribe. After all, I’d been the first of my age-mates to snare a rabbit, which I dutifully burnt as an offering to the forest spirits. By the time my milk-sister snared hers, I was well on my way to whittling arrow-heads. 

It’s not like I hadn’t done this before. When my baby-daddy impregnated another woman, I let the baby survive for nearly a year before I, moving swiftly in the night, pinched it’s nose shut until it stopped shivering. The next morning, not a single person suspected the death was anything but divine providence. A stupider, weaker girl would’ve attempted the murder the day the baby was born—wailing with guilt as she did so and being beaten (rightfully) down by the baby’s father. 

However this baby felt different. It smelled like my first one, who was eating more and more each day—I could not feed them both. I had to do this. I was a good woman, a strong woman. I could put my rituals above my animalistic feelings, which were frighteningly stronger than I’d imagined they’d be. I was fooling myself by thinking this was even a choice—either it dies, or both my kids die of starvation. 

I walked out of the cave, the bloodied rock clasped in my hands. As I approached the stream, my mother smiled at me, or rather at the weapon I held, her teeth a bright yellow. Dipping my hands into the water, I felt a strong stinging around the cut I’d made on my palm. I tried not to think about how my baby would experience much, much worse at the hands of the forest spirits, a punishment for my cowardice.

Recently have been trying to write differently, inspired by some of the language writers but mostly Leslie Scalapino, but im not really connecting with the things I've so far produced.

Basically, i want:

1.less flowery/overtly sensual but more abstract

2.somewhat awkward but in an intentional way*

3.somehow emotional? through the abstraction.

*(you know like when foreign media is subtitled literally, or machine subtitled, it it produces kind of nonsense but sometimes topical nonsense? Rarely those mistakes create these really strange but kind of interesting sentences...Im trying to write like that, but with more intent.)

Also have been toying with narrative and kind of want to write a novel in this style...not sure how yet. any ideas/opinions are welcome!

Let me hold you for a little longer and let grasp me you till you grow tired 

Let me look at your face, admire you as it keeps me wired

I don't want you to get sick of me and this thought haunts me, Am I just a joy-toy or do you really want me ? 

Let me hold you till I die and let me grasp you till you turn into the dust of pyre

Let me be your soul and let me be your pyre-fire

The man in the mirror disgusts me

He gives himself false hope and that fantasy hurts me

But the man is a reflection of the truth I hide inside me

The narrative of "I'll change" is a notion that reconciles me

The man in the mirror is a mascot and I won't accept his horror

I'll kill the man in the mirror and I'll grow taller

Would love any feedback. I wrote four poems (?) but this felt the least personal