Sustainability: CNF Special Issue and Book

 

From our good friends just a ways up the Ohio River:

For a special “Sustainability” issue, Creative Nonfiction is looking for essays that illuminate environmental, economic, ethical and/or social challenges related to the state of the planet and our future.

Whether you’re on a world tour of wind farms or cranking up the a.c.; deciding it’s not worth the trouble to recycle or living off the grid; torn between driving your car, taking public transportation, or riding your bike; leasing your land to hydro-frackers or protesting against them (or, perhaps, both); or just grappling with which apples to buy (organic? local? the red ones?), we want to hear about it in an essay that is at least partly narrative—employing scenes, descriptions, etc.

Your essay can channel Henry David Thoreau or Henry Ford, Rachel Carson or (a literary) Rush Limbaugh; but all essays must tell true stories and be factually and scientifically accurate.* Guest editor Donna Seaman will award a cash prize (amount TBA) for best essay. Selected essays will be published in Creative Nonfiction #51, and an expanded book version will be published in Spring 2014. All submissions will be considered for both the magazine issue and the book.

*A note about fact-checking: essays accepted for publication in Creative Nonfiction undergo a fairly rigorous fact-checking process. To the extent your essay draws on research and/or reportage (and ideally, it should, to some degree), CNF editors will ask you to send documentation of your sources and to help with the fact-checking process. We do not require that citations be submitted with essays, but you may find it helpful to keep a file of your essay that includes footnotes and/or a bibliography.

Guidelines: Essays must be unpublished and no longer than 4,000 words.

There is a $20 reading fee (or send a reading fee of $25 to include a 4-issue subscription to Creative Nonfiction-—U.S. submitters only); multiple entries are welcome ($20/essay) as are entries from outside the United States (though due to shipping costs we cannot offer the subscription deal).

You may submit essays online or by regular mail:

 By regular mail

Postmark deadline January 15, 2013

Please send manuscript, accompanied by a cover letter with complete contact information including the title of the essay and word count; SASE or email for response; and payment to:

 Creative Nonfiction

Attn: Sustainability

5501 Walnut Street, Suite 202

Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Online

Deadline to upload files: 11:59 pm EST January 15, 2013 To submit, please click the appropriate link:

Reading fee only($20) http://bit.ly/PKrqpy Reading fee + 4-issue subscription ($25; U.S. submitters only) http://bit.ly/SUxzTm

 

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