Treasure & Trash: ISSUE #3 Cusper Submissions are OPEN
send us your pieces and pieces by monday July 15th
We are now accepting submissions for short fiction, personal essay, cultural criticism, auto-fiction, journalism and memoir.
The theme for Issue 2 is “Treasure & Trash”
THE THEME:
Garbage bins, tchotchkes, pleather, dive bars, cheap hookups, gold suites, The Gilded Age, dumpster diving, Michelin starred restaurants, leftovers from Michelin starred restaurants, participation trophies, plastic, metal, reality TV, snobbery, red carpets, dark alleys, the night before, the morning after.
What makes one person's treasure another's trash? How do we choose what we value? What would you save from a burning building? Who do you look down upon; look up to? What do we cherish about our lives? And what do we reject?
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:
Submissions should be in the form of either a pitch for a prospective project or a finished piece sent to cuspermag@gmail.com with the subject line "Writing Submission - YOUR NAME."
Finished pieces should be 500-2.5k words. Please note any accepted finished pieces will be further edited, and must still remain on theme.
Pitches should be a paragraph or two description of the fiction or essay you'd like to write, why it interests you, how it fits with cusper, and the style with which you'd like to write it. Please also indicate how long you imagine the finished piece will be — with a maximum of 2.5k words.
The shorter your piece, the more likely it is we will have space for it!
If sending a pitch, please also include an attached writing sample; any piece you think best matches the style of what you'd like to write for us.
Pieces we tend to accept have a strong personal narrative, a unique take on our contemporary culture, and connect our issue's theme to a specific niche or topic in a new and unexpected way. We’re interested in the minuscule, the obsessive, the vulnerable, the excessive. We’re interested not in what happened but in what it meant.
Please know we would love to accept you all and want everyone to be included in the Cusper family, but due to the limits of print media, only a small selection of pieces can be accepted. For issue #2 our acceptance rate for submissions was under 20%. For this issue, we will be accepting SEVEN PIECES for the print addition, with an additional SEVEN PIECES to be published on our Substack.
Submissions for writing are open June 19th until July 15th. Writers will be notified by August 1st. Writing will commence in August with final drafts due in early October. Art submissions will open June 19th and be open until September 15th.