These magazines publish cross-genre/hybrid/experimental writing, in some way. Most of these journals also publish other genres. Most, but not all, of them are open for submissions now. Some of these are paying markets. They are listed here in no particular order.
Dream Pop Journal
They welcome submissions from marginalized voices, and are especially interested in publishing work from emerging writers working in experimental, non-narrative forms. “Please send us your strange utterings, hybrid works, collaborative pieces, visual poetry, collages, and linguistic inventions. We hope that you will challenge the limits of what literature can be and that you will share your results with us.” They publish poetry, a speculative diary, visual art, as well as visual poetry & erasure. They are open year-round. Details here.
Wandering Wave Press: An Anthology of Unconventional Stories
This is a fiction anthology. “We’re looking for genre authors who cross boundaries. Authors whose stories twist the tropes to showcase in a cross-genre anthology of stories that entertain, but read fresh and new. Send us the story that you can’t classify: a story that can’t be pigeon-holed into a single subgenre, or that pushes against your genre’s boundaries. We want to showcase authors who write uncommon fiction.” Some examples are: witches in space, romances that flip gender roles, alternate histories set in the near-future, and fairy tales that start after the ‘happily ever after’. Send stories of 1,000-10,000 words. Pay is $25, and the deadline is 1 December 2022. Details here.
Straylight
They publish poetry, fiction, art in both print and online formats. For the online edition, fiction can be flash to novella length, and poetry can be prose-poetry, or a mix of visual art and poetry. Also, “Straylight Online does not mirror the content of the print edition. … We still look for stories and poems with a strong sense of place and moments that are character-centered rather than those that rely on plot turns and literary tricks. However, we welcome submissions that cross genre boundaries as well as those that explore the way that visual art, music, and literature combine to produce new manifestations of story and verse.” The magazine is published by University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Details here.
Chestnut Review
This is a print and an online magazine. “We are drawn to beautiful language, resonant images, and we crave narrative.” They have fee-free submissions of poetry, flash, and art; 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 Winter issue is 30 September 2022. Details here.
The Disappointed Housewife
They want “fiction, essays, and poetry – along with unclassifiable writings, photos, and drawings – that stretch genre definitions, break the rules, challenge readers, and bend their brains, all while maintaining the highest levels of style and substance. … We’re looking for stories that strike us as different, always with that idiosyncratic touch. Iconoclastic. Kind of bent. Humorous.” And, “There’s so much that can be done in terms of the way readers “read” literature now. Words on a page, sure. But you could construct a short story entirely in tweets or phone texts. Or handwrite poetry on 3 x 5 index cards and photograph them (please write legibly). A photo slide show with enigmatic captions. A facsimile of someone’s job application. The menu of a hip restaurant that’s on the forefront of insect haute cuisine. A story made up of urls that readers click on to go on a virtual journey. … writers who can think of unorthodox and offbeat ways to tell their stories will be highly appreciated here at The Disappointed Housewife.” Send up to 1,500 of prose, or up to 3 poems; and for “items that are harder to categorize (lists, faux official documents, parodic advertising, humorous-text tattoos …), we’ll know the right length when we see it.” Details here.
Sepia Journal
They accept fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and cross-genre submissions. Send up to 8,000 words for prose, or up to 5 poems. They also run Staccato, where they publish music and film. They are open year-round. Details here.
Kaleidotrope
This is a speculative fiction (250-10,000 words) and poetry magazine. “Kaleidotrope publishes predominantly speculative fiction and poetry—science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but also compelling work that blurs the lines between these and falls outside of neat genre categories. Man does not live on space ships, elves, and ghostly ax murderers alone, after all.” They suggest writers look through the archives to familiarize themselves with the zine to get a sense of what they’re looking for. Pay is $0.01/word for fiction, and $5 per poem. Details here.
Afternoon Visitor
This is an online quarterly publication of poetry, hybrid text, visual poetry, and visual art, and they’re interested in giving space to trans + queer writers in each issue. For hybrid text, send a lyric essay, cross-genre of up to 3,000 words, or up to three short pieces with the total word count up to 5,000 words; for visual poetry, send up to 8 pages. Details here.
Doubleback Review
They republish work that was previously published in a now defunct literary journal – you can read about them here. Send poetry (up to 5 poems), prose (up to 4,000 words), art, and multi-genre/hybrid work. Details here.
LIT Magazine
This magazine is published by The New School MFA in Creative Writing program. They publish hybrid works of up to 20 pages – “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. …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.” They also accept fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translations, book reviews, and art. Their reading periods are January-May and September-December. Details here.
elsewhere
“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. We publish only six writers quarterly. Give us your homeless, your animals, your lunch money: we’re hungry.” Submit up to 3 pieces of unlineated work, less than 1,000 words each. 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. Send up to 3,000 words for prose, or up to 6 poems. 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. The deadline is 9 January 2023. Details here.
Diode
They welcome all types of poetry (including, but not limited to, narrative experimental, visual, found and erasure poetry). Send 3-5 poems. They also accept poetry in translation, and collaborative poems. They accept submissions of book reviews, interviews, and essays on poetics, as well, and are open year-round. Details here.
Bending Genres
This magazine publishes flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, and they like work in all categories that blends genres. Send up to 1,000 words for fiction, up to 1,500 words for nonfiction, up to 3 poems. Details here.
The Offing
The Offing publishes cross-genre work, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translations, and art. One of the departments is Enumerate – “Enumerate is our department of cataloging, of naming, of listing. It features work that is hybrid — cross-genre, and work in all genres (fiction, CNF, flash, poetry) — as long as it uses the form of a list (which you may interpret widely). Any length, any subject, any medium (i.e. text, video, photo, music, etc.). The lists should add up to some kind of literary foray, exploration, meditation, commentary, collage.” Not all sections are open for submissions, but many are. The magazine pays $25-100. Details here.
Heavy Feather Review
They have a print issue, open periodically, and submissions for the online magazine are open year-round. They publish poems, short stories, flash fictions, nonfictions, hybrid works, visual art, etc. Also, “For us, “online feature” is a loose term/form, and the topics and form are open to interpretation. The final product can be a traditional essay, poem, short story, list, definition, collage, or whatever you can think up”. They have various sections, too – some of these are: “The Future – “Posing utopic, apocalyptic, dystopic, or superhero solutions to “The Future.” Writers depict futuristic alternative worlds in politics, environment, gender, religion, sexuality, or ethnography’; Haunted Passages – An ominous wind circles you in the middle of an isolated woods. Your friends wander into an empty factory, under the cover of dusk, never to be seen again. These are “Haunted Passages,” new features of unearthly delights; #NoMorePresidents –… HFR has reaffirmed its mission to elevate … marginalized groups by initiating a new blog feature, #NoMorePresidents, an online space for these communities to publish new writing.” Details here and here.
Scrawl Place
This is a journal of place and they publish CNF, fiction, poetry, and hybrids. 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. How that manifests in terms of content, style and form is up to you.” They pay $35, and also accept reprints. Details here.
Foglifter
This is a journal for LGBTQ+ contributors. They want fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid works; for hybrid submissions, send work up to 20 pages. They are especially interested in cross-genre, intersectional, marginal, and transgressive work. They also have a Writers In Need fund to support sliding scale payments for their contributors who opt into the fund. Details here.
The Gravity of the Thing
They publish prose – fiction (including micros) and creative nonfiction, including genre-bending works, poetry, including prose poems and multimedia works, and work for Baring the Device column (about defamiliarized writing). Their reading periods are March, June, September, and December. Details here.
The Spectacle
This magazine, published by Washington University in St. Louis, is open for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. According to their Twitter bio, they are “looking for writing that crosses genre, discipline, and sensibility.” Pay is $50 and the deadline is 1 October 2022. Details here.
Border Crossing
They want micro and flash fiction, and poetry. “We’re especially interested in writing that crosses boundaries in genre or geography, and voices that aren’t often heard in mainstream publications.” Their next submissions period is 15 October 2022 till 1 January 2023. The magazine is associated with Lake Superior State University. Details here.
No Niin
No Niin publishes writing (various genres, including manifestos, letters, reviews, interviews, and hybrids), video, photography, podcasts, comics, and memes. They pay €50–300. Details here.
Half Mystic Journal: Presto
Half Mystic a publishing project dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms, and you can read about that here. The journal publishes poetry, prose, creative nonfiction, translations, and experimental work. They want work on the presto theme for their next issue. “We’re looking for vanishing points, beat drops, bar hops, glow stick raves, impulsive haircuts, disco ball suncatchers, man-made magick, glitter in the shadows, blurred vision, sleight of hand, immaterialism, songs half-lucid and bewitched by the myth of movement.
Presto is a musical direction indicating that an artist play a piece at a rapid tempo, and also an English adverb meaning “suddenly, as if by magic.” … We ask that each piece pertains in some way to music and the presto theme.” Apart from the journal, they also have other opportunities listed. Details here.
Air/Light Magazine
This literary magazine wants “new and innovative works of literary arts”. They publish cross-genre work (original work that blurs the lines of genre and form, whether text only or incorporating images and other multimedia elements), fiction, nonfiction (including collaborative essays), poetry, visual art, music, video, as well as digital, multimedia, and interactive works. Length guidelines are up to 4,000 words for prose, and up to 10 pages for poetry. Pay is $50 for poetry, $100 for responses and department pieces, $200 for fiction, essays/nonfiction, visual art, music, and multimedia. They are scheduled to reopen for submissions on 15 November 2022. Details here.
Deep Overstock: Hacking
They’re reading submissions on the ‘Hacking’ theme. 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 30 November 2022. They read throughout the year, with cut-off dates for issues. Details here.
ctrl + v
This is an online journal that explores the intersection of poetry and collage. Send “all forms of collage—digital, scissor-and-glue, mixed media, fabric, sound”. Submissions are open year-round. Details here.
Ghost Proposal
They publish poetry, essays, images, multimedia, hybrid, cross-, multi-, and post-genre work. “We are interested in work that does not sit comfortably inside genre labels—–work that bends or pushes against traditional limitations; that mixes, blends, and steps outside of the normal bounds.” Watch for their next reading period. Details here and here.
EastOver Press: Cutleaf
Cutleaf is currently open for nonfiction submissions, both in standard and hybrid forms. “Cutleaf is interested in essays of many forms but we prefer a narrative and literary approach to the essay. We do not limit our point of view to the merely factual, but welcome new approaches such as speculative nonfiction, essays based in metaphor, essays in verse, and other re-imaginings of the format. We welcome work about literature, travel, music, food, visual art, and film.
We welcome humor. We invite collaborative work.
We are not interested in polemics, position statements, or editorials.” They generally publish work from 1,500 to 6,000 words, and pay $100-400. The deadline is 30 November 2022. Fiction and poetry were closed at the time of writing. Details here and here.
Bio: S. Kalekar is the pseudonym of a regular contributor to this magazine. She can be reached here.
