Our foundation was blurry at best. I wanted a website that dealt exclusively with mental health and trauma narratives under the artistic guise of literary fiction. This evolved as most small ideas do, and the bigness overwhelmed us for months. I wanted to strong-arm these themes together, introduce the surreal as secondary, in hopes of breaking ground on a concept I’d been struggling with for years. How does the interplay of magical concepts inform art with the millennia-old stake of madness driven through its crown? This complicated matters somewhat. It's dangerous choosing two taboos and burying them in basic code, as it relies on the viewer’s patience with not only illicit subject matter but a deconstruction of our most ingrained bigotry. The mad and the magical aren’t a suitable mix for a website miles above the Dark Web. How could we claim any substantial ground in this community with such a pairing? I worried we’d be labeled a problem, or called even worse. Still, further, how could we locate the main vein of truth in these narratives without succumbing to something I dearly wanted to avoid? I didn’t want us to seem absurd, and I felt the hot breath of invisible pressures on the back of my neck and wondered if I’d tapped into something bigger than my own harshly limited comprehension. Was there a goddess at play? Libre’s always been a strange place, but when I stared into medium blues and scrolled through images of brains, something weird began to happen. Anyways—I was pleased with our inaugurals. Our original stuff knew exactly what we needed and gave it to us willingly. It was only later that I realized we’d need a soft transition to something firmer. We introduced poetry and saw things soar. Later, still, Nonfiction picked up significantly, and I realized our sweet spot.
All genres are welcome, but I especially like a personal narrative that exorcises trauma in the unbrushed teeth attempt at verbally unlacing the genetic and generational for better digging. If you unzip disease in the protected lighting of medical inquiry, you’ll find the ancestral white moth. It’s been waiting in the barcodes of your DNA for a chance to stretch its wings under the slim sun of retrieval. In their writing, we encourage contributors to consider the aftereffects of a lifetime spent recovering.
Libre wants to represent authors who choose the unpopular option, create in brave spirits, preferring ostracism and the solitude it bites its nails on rather than glossy, mainstream prototypes of contemporary writing. While we’re huge fans of this style of literature, we’re mostly fond of the outcasts and souls on the sidelines. The storm’s at safe enough distance. They’re narrating what they notice, and it isn’t what you think.
[GUIDELINES:]
- Please keep longer prose submissions (both fiction and CNF) bearable—our max word limit is 1,500 words.
- Poetry submissions have no word count, but we consider 5 poems per submission a perfect amount for one sitting.
- If you consider your prose piece "flash", do consider mentioning that in your cover letter.
- As for formatting, please use Times New Roman, size 12 pt font, and a color like black will do.
- Double-spacing is a friend for our weary eyes, unless otherwise stated.
- Please name your files using the template: LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_GENRE.
- As for art submissions, while we don't require it, we would love to read a paragraph about the inspiration behind your work. Please include it as part of your cover letter.
- We highly encourage simultaneous submissions as we’re well-versed in the trials and tribulations of publishing. We're honored you're considering us in the first place. Writers and artists have to eat, and to eat, they must publish. Waiting for word is an excruciating process, and we will do our best to get back to you within two months' time. All we ask for is prompt notification that a piece has been accepted elsewhere.
- Please wait one month after submitting to do so again. If you've recently been published in Libre, please wait six months before submitting to us again.
- As a humble start-up, we can’t offer much in the way of payment, but we’re proud to offer our writers and artists $15 per story, essay, artwork, and photograph.
- Libre holds serial rights for three months after publication. Authors and artists agree not to publish or reprint for that amount of time. After the allotted time is up, all rights revert back to the author/artist.
[OTHER STUFF:]
- Submissions are published on a rolling basis unless otherwise stated.
- We publish issues every 3-6 months. These are usually themed, and announced via our social media channels.
- It may take us up to 3 months to respond to your submission. We’ll do our best to beat those odds.,
"Anyone who succeeds in putting off the mantle of faith can do so only because another lies close to hand. No one can escape the prejudice of being human."
-Jung, CONCERNING THE ARCHETYPES AND THE ANIMA CONCEPT, Collective Unconscious
"Only the psyche can observe the psyche."
-Jung, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SPIRIT IN FAIRYTALES, Collective Unconscious
Jung called them nerve spirits and spoke densely enough about the open marriage of psychology and the spiritual that I no longer wonder why he found fairytales subjects worthy of his audience. He meticulously paddle-boarded theory into the brick and dust of our outside storage units. He does this lovingly for his audience, he cannot wait to tell us what he's found in his travels. Those travels are the universal, couch-quality kind, and I remember reading one chapter in Synchronicities about Jung's night spent with a ghost. He wrote with such politeness about the event.
You wonder about his interior life. In COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, Jung slowly and obsessively guides us to insights around the spirit and man while using his pattern of citation, anecdote, and foreign terminology to explain away the skin. There is little difference in the ghost and us, and the ghost, for lack of a witness besides the deceased Jung, may be a portion of ourselves tragically drowned in cerebellum. The activity of meeting must ruin a life, and I suspect the person who is capable of the ghost doesn't appreciate the gift.
How we celebrate our illness is something to look closely at in any country. Ghosts, or addictions -- or the way we see big pharma as both necessary mother and a capitalistic form of disbursement -- we have our local pharmacist and we have our medicine. I've noticed trendy pieces while online shopping that pull hot pink from the critical requirement of storing pills. Our contemporary needs sync better when we fetishize them. Oh, America, place the most popular shade of dopamine on the product, make them forget we're sick.
Illness has been Libre's tennis partner since 2024 and I think Haunted will shave flesh from the sweet concept of writing about one's own tragedy and launch spitballs at what's expected of narrating memory. It's difficult writing. We want stuff that makes the writer read before attacking their own subjective histories. I love the subjective, and think it may be the only way a writer and reader can truly have fries across the table together. This is a mental intimacy that is healthy. If we could provide this for strangers on the website, we may too make them cry. I will worry over whether this body of work would help a cause we--staff--care for deeply.
If you're able to tell the story about yourself, you're able to age, able to appreciate how there is enlightenment during injury; tentatively, this victimization may resurrect new relationships to realism. I prefer a visionary stance to pain: it rolls our eyes back, dries the tongue of any instinct besides reaching that next benchmark of relief. We view our bodies differently for their traumas. There is such strangeness in the afterwards. We navigate the furniture just a little differently, and there is something friendly about the way we treat our health. We relieve by reliving, or, at least, let's try to do that here.
Things my contacts will be grateful for:
- 11 pt. font - (I just like it better)
- 2x spaced pages (double your singles unless there's poetry quoted!)
- Citations are welcome, references need links attached and we'll do the rest
- 500 - 3.000 word counts
- Transparency's like a large list of green-lights. Here's what we're interested in: trauma, psychic experiments, LGBTQ experiences related to health conditions, RX, mean times, mania, seasonal depression, major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive influences, autism, childhood trauma (C-PTSD), PTSD, religious trauma, parkinson's, energy drinks, Jungian theory, adderall, stimulants by another company, bipolar disorders and related mood disorders, personality disorder tests, borderline, schitzophrenia, schizotypal, sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, sociopathy, eating disorders, visions, hyper-religiosity, experiences with magical thinking, genetic inheritances, family health inheritances, suicide survivors and attempt survivors, minority stress, traumatic event: convict/ex-convict , smokers, agoraphobia, schizotypal, alien encounters, trichotillamania, trichophagia, insomnias, sleep-walking, dissociative, two-spirit traumas, hallucinations, drug abuse, dementia, exorcisms, medicine collections, brain traumas, blindess, homelessness, malpractice, arguments for/against therapies, analysis of psychiatric hospital experiences, mental health in relation to a loved one.
- Include an author biography (500 words or les), links, and handles. We don't stress photos due to cyberattacks, stalking, and hate-crimes, but if you would like to include one, we'll be careful to accept.
- $50 per accepted submission.