Writers of the Columbia River Country:
Headwaters Journal is Back!

You are hereby invited to contribute your creative work to Headwaters Journal: Voices of the Columbia. We publish short fiction, poetry, literary biography, personal essays, and humor. We're not necessarily looking for work about the Columbia River itself, or about life in the region, but are simply establishing a forum where the writers in the region can share their work. The aim is to publish a new issue each month with a "best of" Headwaters Journal to appear in print after a year.

Submitting Your Work:

If you have a poem, or a couple of poems, that you think might work in a particular issue, or a story or essay, please email or mail a carefully-edited, finished version of the work to the addresses below. Please include a short biography to serve as a byline that both explains your connection to Columbia River country and outlines your literary interests.

We are a monthly journal looking for selections from writers from the region to publish in a single issue, not a book publisher trying to collect a writer's life's work. So, please contribute a carefully considered selection of your work, and save other work for upcoming issues. We're glad to consider selections from book-length projects, if they stand on their own as complete pieces ‚ a chapter from a novel, for instance, that reads as a short story. We are not publishing book-length work at this time.

If emailing, please send your contributions as attachments in MS Word or some other common word processor so as to retain your original formatting. When pasting formatted text into an email, formatting is often lost.

We also accept work on cd or dvd.

Don't forget to include your name as you wish it to appear in print, a mailing address, phone and email address.

Remuneration:

We certainly don't expect a literary journal to make a lot of money, but whatever profit each issue earns, we'll share with our writers in equal shares.

Banner Ads: During production of each monthly issue, we will invite area businesses to purchase banner ads that will appear discretely throughout the on-line journal. All profits from the sale of these banner ads will be split in equal shares between the contributors of each issue. Frankly, we expect few sales of banner ads until the website is seeing significant traffic, so please be patient.

Writers who contribute their work to Headwaters Journal who wish to help sell banner ads to help to finance a good cause should contact us.

Chapbooks: Further, we will offer for sale chapbooks of participating writer's work for those readers who would like to own a printed edition of a particular writer's work. Chapbooks are a longstanding tradition in the poetry community, which we are adapting to our own use to include prose as well as poetry. They are small books, often handmade, that offer at reasonable cost selections of a writer's work.

Our chapbooks will be laser printed one at a time as orders arrive. We will print on a fine, archival-quality paper and will bind each chapbook with a simple, elegant paper cover. The booklet will be folded, punched and hand-sewn with an attractive cord. Each 4.25 by 7 inch chapbook will include selections by one author whose work appears in Headwaters Journal. Each will be autographed. These custom-made books are both a keepsake item and a way for appreciative readers to support the work of their favorite writers.

We expect each chapbook to sell for about $12. $2 from each book will go toward publication of the "best of" Headwaters Journal that will appear each year. The chapbooks cost about $5 apiece to produce, and the writers will receive the balance, about $5 for each copy sold. Please let us know if you would be interested in participating in this program.

Sponsors: In addition to selling banner ads and chapbooks, we are seeking sponsors who can make donations to help with the publication of the print version of Headwaters Journal each year. Writers whose work appears in the print edition can expect a share of any profit the publication produces.

Remunerative? No. But work published in Headwaters Journal adds to a writer's portfolio, makes a fine contribution to the culture of the greater Columbia River community, and finds an appreciative and thoughtful audience.