Ope here,

The day has finally come: April Fool’s day and the first day of Skipjack Review’s inaugural reading period. Pardon my pun, but the editors and I await your submissions with baited breath. Finish up your final polishing and send us your work!  

We here at Skipjack Review love reading, as writers and editors most often do. We read all kinds of things in our free time and often send one another our own work for edits and feedback. Reading the work of your friends is a special honor. To write is to be vulnerable, so this act takes a lot of trust. Have you ever climbed a really old tree? It takes trust to lean your full weight on those branches. Nobody wants to fall. We hope you’ll trust us to read your work. 

I have no idea what to expect with our first reading period. Who knows how many of you will hear our call out in the world? Maybe we’ll get a few submissions, or maybe we’ll get buried in them and wish we’d set some kind of limit. Truthfully, I hope I drown. Just a little bit. It’s hard to feel overwhelmed when you deeply care about the work. I’m thinking we might be on to something great with this little lit rag. 

So, let’s talk about reading. 

My little Missouri hometown didn’t have a library; we had a Bookmobile. The Bookmobile was a literary RV that showed up in the bank parking lot on Monday afternoons for a few hours. It worked just like a regular library with reservations, books sourced from surrounding libraries, and nature documentaries on VHS. We spent our summers filling up an old milk crate with books at the Bookmobile on Monday, then reading outside high up in a tree the rest of the week. I’ll think of my email as the bookmobile and your submissions as the stories I read and loved when I was little. Heck, maybe I’ll go climb a tree again. 

Our reading period at Skipjack Review begins on April 1st and ends on October 1st. We know from experience that writers don’t often earn anything from their writing, so we’re keeping our submissions fee-free. We are not currently a paying market, but we hope to change that one day. 

You can email your submissions to skipjackreview@gmail.com and expect a reply within six months. Don’t forget to check out our submissions page for our submission guidelines. We hope that you’ll trust us enough to let us read your stuff. Just drop it in the milk crate.