We admire creativity with a side of science. Your health and your writing about it is irreplaceable and confidential. We believe informational art influences recovery.
- Fonts should be something readable, size 11 pt., and pages double-spaced.
- A humble request that final drafts be sent safely as .docx for uploads or shared as Google Docs for fee-waived email submissions.
- Word limits for nonfiction should be in the 500 – 3000 word range.
- Cover letters that share an author’s favorite color make us smile.
- Cover letters are important to us, and I respect the intimacy of gullibility in editorial arts… the writer’s life summary in relation to illness founds an honesty between strangers that, weirdly enough, establishes the sturdy hardwoods of dependency.
The relationship’s limitations, through controlled confession, cover letter, enforces boundaries that value character in the wise system set-up of reader, raw product, editor, and writer.
I’ve set backstage with a better understanding of how I want communication to feel for contributors. With Basecamp, I will create projects upon acceptance of each article that will prove a lean removal of manuscript from every-day messaging.
Hoping this will purify both our team’s and the writer’s subsequent reviewals with sharper focus, and also keep any documents private to those who deserve to see it: myself, writer, and a second editorial eye, via volunteer, vetted with sincerity. I want our parameters to surprise you. There’s generosity based in good faith principal and I think we can produce something important to the community together.
Sharing a diagnosis is one of the most confident things a writer can do for Editorial.
- Another way to help us is by sharing backgrounds in clinical fields, or-–safely, you are under no expectation to share private details that would imperil reputation—if/how you previously became intimate with mental health/psychiatric conditions through lived experience or vicinity of… these make the reading oddly more precious to me, announces worthiness, its base weight has beginnings in recalled memory and the writer’s present temperaments towards histories more insightful.
We’re fortunate for our memories, and I consider this additional information within “spiritual” vicinity of previous, physicalized mental health experiences something to rely upon in final decisions.
- Include a writer’s biography at the end of the document that doesn’t exceed 500 words.
- Social media handles and website links are something we’ll include as long as you feel comfortable sharing.Links to any research used for writing is also encouraged, and I have always enjoyed drafting footnotes.
Payment for accepted submissions is $50.
Email me for fee waiving at librelitmag@outlook.com.
GUIDELINES:
- 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 six months after submitting to do so again.
- Libre holds serial rights for one year 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.
"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.