Contact Us
Contact and Submission Information
General Information
For general questions and what not, email info [at] thepoleax [dot] com.
To contact an editor individually, use the following:
- Dane A. Wisher, Lead Editor: daneawisher [at] thepoleax [dot] com
- Andrew Leber, Editor: andrewleber [at] thepoleax [dot] com
- Courtney Freer, Contributing Editor: courtneyfreer [at] thepoleax [dot] com
- Alexander Studholme, Contributing Editor: alexanderstudholme [at] thepoleax [dot] com
For a complete list of contributors, see our About page.
Pitch/Submission Guidelines
We’re looking for critical, incisive writing about whatever you care about — you just need to make the reader care too. But we’re confident that if you the writer are super into something, you can write it in an engaging way that makes other people super into it too. In general, we’re more focused two things: 1) shorter articles, essays, and commentary and 2) longer journalistic or narrative pieces.
More specifically, we’re interested in how the personal interacts with larger forces. We’re also interested in analyses of complex issues that are accessible to a general audience but doesn’t dumb things down either.
That said, we’re open to all sorts of things, including fiction, creative nonfiction, lists, illustrations, photographs, reviews, your one-act play, maybe even poetry— whatever you got. Just see the line about it being engaging.
Lengthwise, we’re realistic about the internet and how much people are willing to scroll. We try to keep the short pieces under 1,000 words, but if you’ve got something great and it’s longer, we’re open to it and believe readers could be too.
Now for the awkward part: we’d love to pay for your work, but at present we’re volunteer-run, so we can’t. (We won’t say something disingenuous, such as “Exposure is as good as/better than money!” That’d be bullshit and bullshit is unacceptable.) Websites pulling in the revenue to do so have an obligation to pay, but we’re not there yet. Hopefully that day is soon.
We do accept (and encourage!) simultaneous submissions/pitches. Quite frankly, time is fleeting and death is coming for everyone, so it’s unrealistic and ham-fisted to insist on submission and pitch monogamy. We literally roll our eyes when we see that demanded on submission guidelines. However, we do ask as a courtesy that you let us know 1) if you’re also pitching/submitting elsewhere and 2) how soon you’d like a response if the piece is time-sensitive. We try to get back to everyone, but if you haven’t heard from us in a month, assume that we can’t find a place for your piece.
Send general submissions to submissions [at] thepoleax [dot] com. Put your name and a descriptive title for your piece in the header (e.g. Jane Smith, “What Happened When I Lost My Passport in Yangon”). Send the piece either as a Word document or Google Docs link. In the email body, give us a quick description of yourself, the piece you’re submitting, word count, and your relationship to writing. If you’ve got some publications under your name, that’s great, but if all you previously have are your Facebook posts and some Livejournal scribblings from high school, that’s great too! We’re just curious and want to get to know you.
We really do look forward to hearing from you.
