These literary magazines accept hybrid, or cross-genre, writing. They also accept other genres, like fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Some pay writers. Many, but not all, are open for submissions now, or will open soon.
Hunger Mountain
This magazine is affiliated with the Vermont College of Fine Arts. They charge a submission fee for other genres, but hybrid submissions are free. “This category is for the bold, the brave, and the slippery. It is for those who, like us, relish the in-between, the genre-less, the boundless, the blended. Feed us words that play with content and form, with a side of the ineffable made effable. Let us sip dark matter from your Klein-bottle, the uncontainable contained. We seek hybrid assemblages that obliterate, sneak beyond, slither between, ooze under—yes subvert—genre(s). Give us Donna J. Haraway’s cyborg literature, Deleuze and Guittari’s lines of flight, Negerastani’s ()hole complex; give us nascent rubrics for now. Great art shouldn’t have to fit in a box made by someone else. Words and images (ideally sympoetic/embodied/entangled with text) only, please.” The deadline is 1 December 2024. Details here and here.
Frighten the Horses
This magazine is an offshoot of Exist Otherwise literary journal. Frighten the Horses publishes experimental writing. “To be accepted, your work must defy form, convention, and/or expectation.” Submission is via a form. Details here.
Bending Genres
They publish fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, and like work in all categories that blends genres. Send up to 1,000 words for fiction, up to 1,500 words for nonfiction, or up to 3 poems. Details here.
Backwards Trajectory
The magazine publishes “bite sized artifacts.” “Send us a drawing, a photograph, a piece of flash, a poem, a receipt, a list, a matchbook, an outline for a five paragraph essay on photosynthesis, whatever you have lying around, send us your dusty masterpieces you’ve been neglecting for donkeys years.” They publish prose, poetry, visual arts, and found objects. They want works up to 200 words. Details here.
Club Plum
They publish hybrid works (“Send genre-bending and language-bending works” of up to 3,000 words), creative nonfiction (“Send flash, segmented, braided, hermit crab, hybrid and beautiful essays. Send micro-nonfiction. Send hard-to-classify short pieces.”), prose poetry, flash fiction, and art. Details here.
elsewhere
Submit up to 3 pieces of unlineated work, less than 1,000 words each. “elsewhere cares only about the line / no line. We want short prose works (flash fiction, prose poetry, nonfiction) that cross, blur, and/or mutilate genre.” They accept fee-free as well as tip-jar submissions. Details here.
Pine Hills Review
They publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. Hybrid and experimental works are especially encouraged. “Hybrid or cross-genre work or visual work or excerpts from larger projects should also be no more than 3,000 words total. If there are visual elements or are sending visual work, attach as jpeg in your email or paste it into your Word file.” Details here.
The Gravity of the Thing
They publish genre-bending works, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, including prose poems and multimedia works, and work for Baring the Device column (about defamiliarized writing). They will reopen for submissions in December. Details here.
Scrawl Place
This is a journal of place and they publish hybrids, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. This is “part visitor’s guide, part literary journal.
The audience for this online publication is the guest, the visitor, the traveler, the day-tripper, the out-of-towner, and the in-towners eager to wander. I’m looking for submissions about “places in the places” where you live or where you’ve visited. My only fixed criteria is that your submission be about or connected to or associated with a specific, physical place that someone could visit. The more specific the place, the better.” They also accept previously published work. They pay $35. Details here.
Brink
This is a print journal “dedicated to publishing hybrid, cross-genre work of both emerging and established creatives who often reside outside traditional artistic disciplines. … Hybrid writing often includes multiple mediums such as visual and written elements that together accomplish a result impossible to achieve alone. Text-based hybrid writing harnesses form and content in singular ways to create dynamic work primed to offer new perspectives, voices, and ideas that prioritize the combination of multiple literary and artistic elements to produce a readable, engaging piece of work.” And, “Through Submittable, we accept a variety of creative work from Nonfiction to Fiction, from Poetry to Translation. But our hearts beat strongest for hybrid work.
We are interested in work that presses boundaries by using more than one medium to tell a story; work that looks and feels different on the page. Additionally, we look for submissions that engage the issue’s theme and the notion of being on the brink.” They read during January and July, and usually publish themed issues; their Submittable will open during the reading period. They pay $25-100. Details here and here.
The Cincinnati Review
They accept fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid works for their online feature, miCRo (up to 500 words) for most of the year, and for their print magazine, usually, thrice a year – September, December, and May. There is a cap on submissions for the print magazine. Pay is $25/page for prose and $30/page for poetry in the print journal and $25 for miCRo posts or special features. Details here (general guidelines), here (what the editors look for), and here (submission manager).
Thin Air Magazine
The magazine is published by Northern Arizona University. Submissions for Thin Air Online are fee-free. “Thin Air Online, distinct from our print magazine, accepts the following: poems, art, fiction, tiny films, nonfiction, humor, songs, paintings, collages, interpretative dances, jokes, audio projects and other precious creations that celebrate the seasons.” Currently, they’re looking for works that celebrate winter. Details here.
Deep Overstock
They’re reading submissions on ‘Staff Picks’ for their spring issue, which includes these themes: Fairy Tales, Paranormal Romance, Dreams, Horror, Structures, Animals, Beekeeping, Hacking, and Classics. The magazine publishes “fiction, poetry, comics, art, images, medical reports, plays, essays, philosophies, sculptures, sounds, mushroom dataset analyses, magic spells, fairy tales, folklore, riddles, jokes, horoscopes, death-predictions, and more. Surprise us!” They have a strong commitment and focus on those in the book industry, but they do accept work from writers and artists who work in any field; you can read about that here. They’re reading on the current theme until 28 February 2025. They read throughout the year, with cut-off dates for issues. Details here.
EastOver Press: Cutleaf Journal
They are currently open to nonfiction; “We take a narrative, literary, and imaginative approach to nonfiction. We welcome traditional essay formats but we also welcome variations such as speculative essays, essays in verse, “hermit crab” essays, or essays that explore the use of language in imaginative ways. We are open to any topic that moves a writer, but particularly invite work that addresses the ethics and practice of distinctive occupations. The nonfiction editor, a physician, takes special interest in reading work from physicians, dentists, nurses, social workers, scientists, technicians, and other clinicians and caregivers involved in health care and public health.” They pay $100-300, and the deadline is 30 November 2024. Their Submittable is open to other calls as well, including nonfiction manuscripts; please be sure to submit to the correct one. Details here.
Bennington Review
This magazine is associated with Bennington College. They publish fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, film writing, and cross-genre work. “In the spirit of poet Dean Young’s dictum that poets should be “making birds, not birdcages,” we are particularly taken with writing that is simultaneously graceful and reckless.” Send up to 30 pages of fiction or creative nonfiction, or 3-5 poems. Pay is $120-250 for prose, and $25 per poem. Their submission portal will be open during their reading period, 6 January to 9 March 2025. Details here.
Afternoon Visitor
They publish hybrid text, poetry, visual poetry, and visual art, and they’re interested in giving space to trans + queer writers in each issue; you can read about them here. For hybrid text, send a lyric essay, or cross-genre work of up to 3,000 words, or up to three short pieces; for visual poetry, send up to 8 pages. Details here.
The Ex-Puritan
They publish fiction, nonfiction, experimental/hybrid work, interviews, reviews, and poetry. They accept a limited number of fee-free submissions every month. They pay CAD50-200. The deadline is 25 December 2024, or until filled, for their next issue; they read submissions year-round, and have a monthly submission cap for fee-free submissions. Details here and here.
Chestnut Review
They have fee-free submissions of poetry, flash, and art, and also offer fee-free submissions of longer prose to Black and Indigenous writers. Also, “If you have work that doesn’t fit neatly into the below categories, that doesn’t mean we won’t want to see it. Choose the most appropriate and include a note—we’ll figure it out.” Contributors are paid $120. They read throughout the year, with cut-off dates for issues; deadline for the Spring issue is 31st December. Details here.
The Spectacle
This magazine is published by Washington University in St. Louis, and accepts fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. “We welcome and embrace all styles, genres, and modes of writing, but we are particularly interested in vivid, striking imagery and language that lingers with us long after we’ve finished reading. We value relationships between the literary and visual arts, and aim for content that reminds us that our lenses matter—they focus, distort, clarify, and conceal.
Send us your slipstream and irrealism. Send us your eco-fabulism. Send us your villanelles about time travel and your reimagined fairy tales. Send us something new to believe in. Push and break boundaries. Stretch a genre to its extreme. Invent a new genre. Redefine Spectacle.” Currently, they are only open for visual art, graphic narrative, and poetry comics submissions; the deadline is 30 November 2024. Details here.
Abandon Journal
“We want to showcase writing and artwork that has been created with abandon. That term is free to be interpreted liberally, but ideally it is the kind of work that takes risks, created in a space wherein the artist doesn’t care what anyone else thinks or what everyone else is doing.” They publish work in various genres: hybrids, fiction (including genre fiction), creative nonfiction, poetry, art, craft essays and writing about art, graphic novels, cartoons, comics, as well as book reviews and interviews (pitch first for these). For hybrids, they say, “Abandon Form: hybrid, experimental, and/or idiosyncratic work that doesn’t fit into conventional genres, categories, or forms”. They pay $15. Watch for their next submission period. Details here.
Mslexia
They publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry, articles, and fun stuff by women. They ask for some mixed-genre submissions too, including Eyeverse in poetry – “A short poem (no more than four lines) on any subject, plus an original illustration – related to the poem – which may be a drawing, painting or photograph, but must be created by the poet herself or by someone who has given permission for the illustration to be used with the poem.” Some sections are only open to subscribers, but not all; a few calls are themed; and deadlines vary. Fees start at £30 for most pieces, while some pieces are unpaid (see here). Details here.
Vast Chasm
Their website says, “Vast Chasm Magazine publishes bold work that explores the expansive human experience, including flash and short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other nonconforming work.” For nonconfirming works, they say, “use this submission category if you feel your work does not conform to the other genres listed. For example, you might submit a hybrid piece, a hermit crab essay, or anything we haven’t seen before.” They pay $50. Details here and here.
*82 Review
They publish fiction, nonfiction, word + image, erasure text (writing + art/altered text), collage poems, and hidden gems (experimental, free, hybrid, invented, narrative, prose). Details here.
Matter Press: The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
They publish fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as fiction and creative nonfiction prose poetry, as long as it is compressed in some way. Pay is $50 for works up to 600 words, and the deadline is 15 December 2024. Details here and here.
LIT Magazine
They accept hybrid works (up to 10 pages), fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translations, book reviews, and art. “Hybrid prose works generally experiment with non-traditional stylistic forms. This category is not just for works that defy casual interpretation, but also works that include elements generally reserved for non-prose writing.
At Lit, we are interested in hybrid prose that is aware of the tension between fiction and non-fiction, and wants to exploit, reify, and expand those terms, but not be contained by them. If it’s too prose-y to be a poem, but not clearly a short story or an essay, it might belong here. But this is not a category for the unsure – on the contrary, the best examples of hybrid prose are always the most deliberate.” LIT is published by The New School MFA in Creative Writing program. The deadline is 15th December 2024. Details here.
Bio: S. Kalekar is the pseudonym of a regular contributor to this magazine. She can be reached here.
