Now Seeking: Essays, Photo Essays, Interviews, and Book Reviews
We are currently taking completed submissions and pitches for the following categories of writing to publish online here at wildlotpress.com. Fuller descriptions of these categories, as well as the pay scale, follow.
- Essays—illustrated or not
- Photo essays
- Book reviews
- Interviews
Pitches can (and probably should) be brief. However, they must include specific details called for in the category breakdowns below, as well as a short bio.
We are not a magazine or literary journal; we publish one piece at a time and there is no schedule. The upshot is, we’re looking for really special pieces of high quality (which is also reflected in the pay scale). Work published here may be subsequently published in print. We are open to publishing previously published work, as long as you can demonstrate you hold the rights and it is not available by click. However the pay is not the same as for original work.
When you are ready to submit, email publisher@wildlotpress.com.
Essays
We want to foster an online space that eschews “No Trespassing” signs and showcases work that teaches us how the landscapes that we dwell in came to be as we experience them: ghosts of Utopian dreams hiding in brick, mysteries buried under creeping vines, portents of times to come in the eerie behavioral changes of wildlife, pieces that show the wild green edges insinuating themselves through cracks in the built facades of our civilization, tracing down old urban morphologies, old customs, old entanglements with nature, now in flux. We like essays that weave personal narrative with reflection, research, and scholarship.
As you can see from what we’ve already published, we like several genres of essays:
- Critical readings, of film, fiction, contemporary thought, etc.
- Personal narratives
- Braided longform
- Photo-illustrated explorations
If you have something “wild lotty” but it doesn’t fit neatly into these categories, please be encouraged to send us a query.
Looking at what we’ve written and published so far should give you some idea of where we’re coming from, but to better help you, here are a few examples of the kinds of of work we love and would love to publish:
- This “urban comic” about Berlin’s teeming neglected zones by Ali Fitzgerald, published at The Guardian as part of their Illustrated City series
- “A Possible River”, a gorgeous photo essay at Emergence Magazine, by Bear Guerra, following the course of the Los Angeles River
- The haunting essay “Shikataganai” by Florence Caplow, about exploring the garden ruins of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, appearing in the Chelsea Green book Walking on Lava
- This illuminating interview with Anna Tsing, co-editor of the groundbreaking book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, at Edge Effects
- The essay “A Garden or a Grave? The Canyonic Landscape of the Tijuana-San Diego Region,” by Lesley Stern, published in the above-mentioned book and also available as an illustrated reading performance here
- This first-person journey/reflective narrative published in the first issue of The Common, “Brown Road (1853–1932)”, by Ted Conover
- The essay “Shifting: Cycles of Loss on a Sinking Coast,” about the truth of water in Louisiana, by Anne Gisleson, appearing in issue 12 of Ecotone
Book Reviews
Any book, current or otherwise, dealing with thinking about fluxes in the relationship between human civilization and “nature” is fair game. What we hope to accomplish with book reviews is to build an archive of texts. The pitch is really important—give us an idea of what you’d like to say, or what questions you want to ask, before you write the review. We’ll publish reviews of climate-change poetry, cli-fi, nonfiction about urban wildlife/nature, anything about the Anthropocene, and art, graphic novels, fiction, film, and TV having to do with place and the above themes.
Interviews
We are interested in hearing from people who bring a unique understanding of place and/or the relationship of human civilization to the planet Earth. Writers, ethnographers, artists, city planners, naturalists, gardeners, biodynamic/permaculture farmers, urban hikers, urban birders, eco-historians—people of any range of disciplines contending with the connections between the abstractions we call “human society” and “nature.”
Pay Scale
| Genre | Word Count | Art | Pay |
| Essay (longform illustrated) | 4,000–5,000 | 8+ photos/illos. | $250 USD |
| Essay (illustrated) | 3,000–4,000 | 4+ photos/illos. | $200 USD |
| Essay (longform) | 4,000–5,000 | — | $150 USD |
| Photo Essay | 1,000+ | 8+ | $150 USD |
| Essay | 2,000–3,000 | — | $100 USD |
| Essay (short) | <1,500 | — | $50 USD |
| Book Review | 1,500–2,000 | — | $50 USD |
| Interview | 1,500–2,000 | — | $50 USD |
Payment will be made the month following publication of your piece.
When you have your submit or pitch ready, reach out to us by email: publisher@wildlotpress.com.