Stirring is an online journal published by Sundress Publishing. Sundress is a mostly women run publishing collective that publishes a number of literary journals, anthologies, chapbooks, and books. They also run the prestigious Best of the Net competition and the Gone Dark Archives a place to preserve journals that are no longer active. It is good to be published in Stirring because you are now loosely connected to this larger publishing organization.

Stirring has been around since 1999 and is one of the oldest literary journals that is still active. They are a monthly journal interested in publishing poetry, fiction, photographs, and creative non-fiction (largely personal essays and memoir).  They have a large editorial staff and regularly have guest editors. So it is hard to predict what kind of writing the current editor will gravitate towards.

They are also more open to prose poetry and collaborative pieces than most other contemporary journals. They also publish the occasional poetry broadside. A broadside is a single page with text, intended for hanging on a wall. Most broadsides are made on beautiful paper and printed with a letterpress.

When you submit your work, you do so to the individual email address of the editor you are submitting to, so make sure you submit it to the appropriate editor. Poetry should be included in the body of the email, prose should be attached in a .RTF or .doc format. Photography should be attached in a .JPG format.

They respond to most submissions within three months or less. They accept less than a quarter of the work submitted to them. You can submit to them once a month, so that you can submit to them even before you have heard back from them.

To learn more visit their website here: http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/