Wilderness House Literary Review

All submissions must be in electronic form. Our preference is an MS Word file uploaded through the system below. Please do not send us pdf files. We can't use them.

By submitting work to us you grant us a non-exclusive license to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up until the issue deadline (see above).

We don't pay so you retain all copyrights. If we publish your work online we may include it in a printed edition.

Poetry may be submitted in any length. Please don't submit 100 poems and ask us to pick 3.

Fiction may be submitted in three formats:

very short stories less than 500 words in length
short stories less than 1000 words in length
Short stories that don’t fit the above should be less than 3000 words.

We also accept longer forms of fiction occasionally.

Please, one fiction submission only per author, per issue. If you submit multiple stories for a single issue, we reserve the right not to review additional stories you submit after the first one.

Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some interesting footnotes. Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000 words

Book Reviews should be positive unless the author is a well-known blowhard. Our mission is to encourage literature not discourage it..

Art: Minimun of 6 pieces. Please incluce a bio and statement about your work. Any form of art may be submitted with the constraint that it must be something that can be published in 2 dimensions. It’s hard to publish sculpture but illustrations together with some intelligent prose count.

Published works are welcome with proper attribution.

Please submit all works electronically. Click here to submit to Wilderness House Literary Review

Welcome to the 77th issue (Volume 20, no 1) of the Wilderness House Literary Review. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards.

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The stories, articles, poems and examples of art have been presented as PDF files. This is a format that allows for a much cleaner presentation than would otherwise be available on the web. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader (used to read a PDF file) on your computer you can download one from the Adobe website. These files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading then, however we think the beauty of the words deserves a beautiful presentation.

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It costs quite a bit of money to keep publishing WHLR - Please help us out if you can as every little bit helps.

Our ISSN number is 2156-0153.

Let us know what you think in our Letters to the Editor.

Finally, the copyrights are owned by their respective authors whose opinions are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or partners.

Table of Contents

Opine
Search
Art
Fiction

Essays
Poetry
Review
Cumulative Index

Opine

Still Winter?

The crocuses are blooming all over the front yard and in what will soon be the deep woods, daffodils are displaying their yellow plumage. Squirrels are scurrying around the yard searching for the nuts they hid last fall. And in the eutrified pond across the street skunk cabbage is sprouting from the muck. Spring is here. Spring is the season of hope, of new births, of happiness.

But there are clouds on the horizon. “Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning,” doesn’t always foreshadow a storm but does just often enough to take note. There are wars and rumors of wars in far-off places. The Gestapo snatch unknowns from the streets. We are told they are the undesirables. They are not our neighbors. We don’t know them. Perhaps it's true. But we are uncomfortable, red sky in the morning. The world, at least this corner of America, is on pause. We hold our breath hoping the dark clouds will yield just a passing spring shower. We know this too shall pass … eventually, but we worry about what the debris field will look like when the storm is over. Will we survive it? Like all things, only time will tell.

This issue begins our 20th year. We started this publication because way back in 2005 many of us had a chronic complaint. There were a lot of very good writers and very few venues for our scribbles. So, almost on a whim, we started Wilderness House Literary Review and Wilderness House Press. We’re still here thanks to our volunteer editors and a few donations from our fans. If you’d like to join us let us know. We are always looking for help.

This is also an opportunity to brag. This editor’s novel, Poplar Hill, has just been released as an audiobook. For some reason a hardback didn’t do it. An e-book didn’t do it but an audiobook woke up the teaming masses. Well, at least some journalists and video bloggers. https://tinyurl.com/2xkeb2qm

Search the house

Art

Robert Markey

Essay

There is, sometimes, a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. We have several essays that muddy that line, again. I've been assured by the authors that their stories rightly belong here and not in our fiction section. You can be the judge of that.