Submit your art and writing to Seedlings

Starting this summer we are going to be open for submissions on a rolling basis. This means you can submit anytime for upcoming magazine issues and books.

We believe this will allow us to be more open with our community of artists and writers. It means we can be in touch before the deadline with feedback if we’d like some edits or tweaks to your work before we start printing, allowing us to develop your work with you, rather than the old-fashioned binary of acceptance/rejection.

What are looking for

We are looking for the real, the secret, the sacred, the alternative – what ‘natural’ means to you or the authentically artificial – the wisdom of your years or your teenage attempt at freedom – a portrait of your garden and its own memories of you – what you learnt from humiliation – your grandad’s last forgotten apple core from that holiday in Lowestoft – the alley between the garages where you were foraged brambles – the bench where you sat and listened to the whole of the the whole of the moon – the way your partner clicked their heels when you dropped them home after your first date – which flower means hope and which means hunger – the pawprints of a fleeing fox – rewarded faith.

If you need more specific details of what form this could take — please read on below.

Submission details

We just released Seedlings Spring — our first handmade book of handpicked art and writing about the season of Spring. It encapsulates this precious time of rebirth, with stories and art about the most hopeful time of year. We are selling them here.

Full guidelines are below and we will have messages soon with other top tips for submitting and what details we love to see.

It’s free to submit, but we would really appreciate a donation of £2 to help us through the process. We'd love the art and literary worlds to be far more nurturing and open for creativity than they are, and so have decided once again not to charge for submissions. If you did wanted to support us though we are accepting donations at the link below. Just £2 would be really welcome as we are running Seedlings alongside our day jobs and the process takes so much work behind the scenes! If you also wanted feedback in this submission round, we'd appreciate a donation too, but we understand some people can't spare the £2 at this time.

We will offer all selected artists and writers a fee, calculated once we know the finances for our Summer book as we’re trying some new ideas. We will also sell prints on our site and split those profits 50-50 with the artist.

Below are details on

• Writing Submissions

• Art Submissions

• Commissions

• Workshops and Feedback

Writing Submissions

Seedlings is a handmade book and the type is printed using letterpress. Due to the small dimensions of our book we have to be quite precise with word counts in the main. If your piece is longer we could print it, but the content and quality would have to justify the extra pages.

We accept submissions on a rolling basis, and are particularly interested in nature writing, queer pieces, microfiction and interesting use of form.

Poetry - please send no more than five poems. We would prefer poetry to be less than 22 lines (including line breaks). Longer poetry will be considered, but as stated above, it will be less likely to be included in the final edit as it will take two or more pages.

Prose, stories - please send stories up to 777 words. We do accept essays and journalism but would like them to be closely associated with our ethos and values, with a touch of the lyrical.

We love analogue forms - typography, typewriting, handwriting and calligraphy. If you’d like to send a physical copy with your work, please email your submission first and we will reply with an address you can send your piece to!

You are welcome to send us things that have been published elsewhere so long as you have full rights over the work. Similarly, please don’t send work derived from any copyright material that you do not have rights to use. If unsure, please research the rights of the material you wish to use or adapt.

To send us your writing please email your work as a .docx or .pdf to mail@seedlings.studio.

Please put ‘Writing submission’ in the subject line. This is very important as we may miss your submission if you do not.

Please also let us know what name you would like to be credited with. Finally in your email please include some information about yourself as a writer.

Art Submissions

We are keen to see a wide range of art across a range of mediums and styles. We would especially like to see work using natural and eco-friendly materials. Please send no more than five pieces, but feel free to link your website or portfolio.

Please include in your submission email:

• the name and date of each of your pieces

• the medium and/or creation process

• dimensions

• a high quality JPEG photo

If you have work that you’d like to reproduce with eco-friendly materials but haven’t currently got the funds, then please submit your work as it is, and tell us how you envision recreating it. We may be able to fund you.

To send us your art please email your work as a high quality .JPEG to mail@seedlings.studio. Please put ‘Art submission’ in the subject line. This is very important as we may miss your submission if you do not.

Please also let us know what name you would like to be credited with. Finally in your email, please include some information about yourself as an artist.

Commissions

Later in the submission process we will be sharing some of the pieces we love of both writing and art - for other creators to respond to them. Throughout our Spring Submissions we had queries from illustrators and writers who wanted a prompt to work to. We hope this will create a welcome outlet for these kind of creative responses.

Workshops and Feedback

We will have workshops soon for writing and art — both as creative practices generally and for submitting to Seedling in particular — more details soon.

We are still working out if offering feedback is a feasible part of our process. Since the Spring submissions open call we wanted to offer feedback where possible on why we didn’t accept work, and areas where artists could perhaps improve, but with the volume of work that producing Seedlings takes it is quite difficult. The idea of offering notes fits our ethos of nurturing artists and creativity, and we have received grateful replies to the feedback we’ve sent, but we will not be able to guarantee offering personalised feedback going forward. If you donate, we may be more likely to send some feedback as it reflects the effort it takes us to evaluate and reply to so all of our submissions, but we understand not everyone is in the position to donate.