Submissions

We’re looking for prose, poetry, and illustrations that illuminate the miniature tender, bold, bittersweet, tragic, swoon-worthy, and spicy moments you share with the people you’re connected to (either happily or unhappily). This may include lovers, friends, family (however you define it), or some unexpected relationship.

Examples of the kinds of relationship writing we love include: this Modern Love essay about a woman’s relationship with her mother shifting during the pandemic (many ML essays fit our publication’s voice), this short story by Brandon Taylor about family trauma and loneliness, and this essay by Ann Patchett about her 50-year friendship.

We also want to hear about your experiences that landed ‘between’ the black and white binary that our culture presents as the only options. This excellent essay, about the need for a more nuanced conversation about abortion, is a great example of what we’re looking for in this vein.

These moments should be easily digestible but still satisfying, like a dense bite of cake. With that in mind, prose should ideally be under 2000 words and poems limited to two pages. Comics should max out at 10 frames, although we can be flexible for the right project.

*Before You Submit*

Please make sure you have a Medium account and a rough understanding of how to submit to Medium publications – this Medium help center piece is a great start.

Please also prepare a full proposed title and subtitle for your piece – we will help you hone these but we’d rather not have to write them for you! We hate writing titles as much as any other writer ;)

For extra credit, you can find an image to go with your submission! If you don’t own an image that works, we recommend searching Pixabay or Unsplash for free images and linking back to the artist.

How to Submit

Please send your completed, unpublished draft as a shared Google Doc with edit permissions to momentsbetweenlit@gmail.com. Your email should follow the below format:

Subject line: Proposed Headline

Email body: Hello/pleasantries; your Medium handle (ie @ahputnam); a brief overview of your piece (genre, why you wrote it, what it’s about, why it feels important); a short bio/Twitter handle/anything else you want us to know or include in our promotional materials; polite sign-off.

The Editorial Process

If your piece is accepted, we will email you proposed publication date and a planned schedule for edits, then give general feedback and make any suggestions for line edits directly in your Google Doc. That email will also contain a proposed publication date and expected revision deadline/information about tags etc. Once the piece is finalized, we’ll add you as a writer and you can add the approved revision to the publication — please note that we reserve the right to delete added work and remove you as a writer if the piece is drastically different from the approved final draft.

If we do publish your piece, please refrain from submitting again for a period of six months. We want to give voice to a wide range of writers and subjects, so with rare exceptions we won’t be publishing the same writer twice in six months.

Response Time

We will endeavor to reply within six weeks — if you haven’t heard back after a month, feel free to send us a nudge, but please be kind. We’re all volunteers, with various day and night jobs that often take priority over our passion projects, because: capitalism.

Special projects or forms not mentioned here can be pitched to momentsbetweenlit@gmail.com

Payment & Rights

We specifically chose Medium as our host because their Partner Program pays writers whose work is viewed enough times — please make sure you’re enrolled so you can get paid! Of course, if this publication grows enough to monetize further through donations or any other means, our writers will be first in line for any possible payment.

As for rights, we ask for exclusivity for 30 days following the publication of your piece — after that, you’re free to submit it to other publications or publish it on your own. Please let us know if it gets accepted anywhere so we can hype it up anew!