Riddle Fence

This Fall, I joined Riddle Fence as the Creative Non-Fiction Editor. Since then, I’ve been sifting through hundreds of submissions, searching for gold. A few people have asked what exactly I hope to publish so here are some suggestions.

First off, please don’t send me:

• poetry (there are other editors helming that section)

• fiction (ditto!)

• reviews (they are published online; get in touch with the managing editor)

• opinion pieces

• academic essays

• journalism

Riddle Fence #53

And here’s what I want:

1. Creative non-fiction means true stories. Story is important. There should be a narrative drive and emotional resonance. As in fiction, if you’re skirting the emotions, you’re likely skirting the conflict too. Any story — true or false — without conflict is boring.

2. Strong writing. That might be poetry in motion — beautiful sentences that contain insight, interesting metaphor, or simply demand to be read aloud. But strong writing can also be spare, unfussy prose.

3. The important thing is clarity. If the work is full of vague abstractions, if the tense shifts are perplexing, if there are too many flashbacks and flashforwards that trip the reader up, it’s an automatic rejection. Ask your most critical frenemy to read your submission and circle the places where they got confused.

4. Clarity also applies to the subject as a whole. Too many questions in an essay is a red flag, suggesting the author is still feeling their way through a draft. You should be able to summarize your piece in a single sentence. (In the cover letter, not the essay!) For example, Andreae Callanan’s “All The Ghosts a Voice Can Summon” is about complicated grief and Sinéad O’Connor. Bushra Junaid’s “On Hosting” is about feeling like an outsider in one’s own home. Though I can’t take credit for finding either of these, they are excellent examples of the types of submissions I want to publish.

5. When I tell you an essay is about complicated grief or feeling like an outsider, you can already feel the tension. Find a subject that is difficult and personally hurts you and then wrestle it out on the page.

6. Brevity. I have 6,500 words per issue and a mandate to publish at least 50% NL-content. Anything that’s over 2,500 words and doesn’t fit into that mandate must hit all five marks above. If your piece is 750 words, you can get away with 4/5, maybe even 3/5. But if your essay is over 3,000 words and you are not from this province, writing in this province or about this province, then it absolutely must be a stellar 5/5 and even then, I might still have to reject on the grounds of word-count. What is this submission about? What makes you uncomfortable? Hone in on those two things and strip away the excess. Here are some tips on trimming.

Speaking of identity…

Riddle Fence is a Newfoundland and Labrador arts and letters magazine. This is a place of storytellers and vibrant culture and part of our mandate is to foster those things, which is why I’m aiming for 50% NL-content in the creative non-fiction section.

In practice that means I’m looking at addresses. Please self-identity if you were born here and are in the diaspora. I’m interested in writing about this place as well. If you lived here and are writing a reflection on that time, I’m game to read it. I’m less keen on tourism. I’m starved for writing from Labrador or by Labrador authors. Please, please, self-identify in the cover letter.

None of this equals automatic acceptance. The writing still has to hit at least 5 or 6 of the marks listed above but the odds of publication are better.

This is not a Riddle Fence mandate but a personal goal: I want more colour in our pages. Are you a BIPOC author? Self-identify. (I know, I know. I hate doing it too but we get hundreds and hundreds of submissions. Help an editor out!)

The ideal submission

I’d love to see something unconventional, say a collection of vignettes curated around a theme. See, for example, Gary Barwin’s “Meat and Bone” in this issue of Grain Magazine. Or a complex essay that combines a first person narrative with a didactic deep-dive into a related subject, toggling back and forth, each strand of the essay shining a light on its opposite. For the latter, I would break the 3,000 word limit, especially if it checked the NL-content box. Good examples of this kind of complex creative non-fiction can be found in Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, Jen Sookfong Lee’s Superfan, and Sarah Polley’s Run Towards The Danger.

And don’t forget!

My new year’s resolution is that I’m not reading any submission that doesn’t conform to the guidelines. So please attend to these basic civilities:

• Upload your work as a .doc or .docx file

• Double-space

• Make sure your name, title, and word count appear on every page of your submission

• Cover letters are appreciated, especially if they include the word count

Okay, done all that? You’re ready to submit. I can’t wait to read it!