SUBMISSIONS

Submissions are currently: open

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “migration” means “the seasonal movement or temporary removal of a person, people, social group, etc., from one place to another” and “the movement of a person or people from one country, locality, place of residence, etc., to settle in another”.

But few other words have become so charged. From the fallout of the climate catastrophe to the despicable term “remigration” used by neofascists all over Europe to mask their plans of even more camps and deportations, “migration” has in the western world became a word with mostly negative connotations. But then, many creatures across the planet migrate; and indeed all of us humans did and do, all the time throughout the centuries. So for our next issue, we want to explore the meaning of “migration” outside of images of small boats and the stoking of hate: tell us stories of storks flying from Africa to Poland, about your family, about the new self you discovered far from home, about why movement matters. Submissions are open until November 15th, 2026.

Here on Elsewhere we publish English-language and translated writing from new, established, or emerging writers and artists in the form of essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, book reviews, music, visual art and photography. We are particularly interested in featuring work from and about places and perspectives that are less well represented, including writing in translation, and experimental or hybrid forms - but we are open to all writing on place so please send us your best work! If you are a translator with English as your target language please feel free to reach out to us too.

As we are an online publication, pieces with a length of 1000-1500 words or between 3 to 5 poems depending on length work best for us, but we are happy to discuss longer pieces of work too. Please submit in an Open Office, Word or PDF format and include a short biography. For translations, please clear translation rights before submitting to Elsewhere. We do not accept multiple submissions at the moment. Copyright of published pieces remains with the author. Please send all submissions to elsewhereeditors@gmail.com

Please note that we do not pay for contributions, Elsewhere takes no advertising and no member of the Elsewhere team is paid.

On the usage of AI:

At Elsewhere, we believe that we as humans haven’t fully grasped the dangers of AI, that it is highly dangerous to human creativity and puts an unwarranted additional strain on a planet already reeling from the climate catastrophe. In their current stage large language models (LLMs) especially are nothing better than glorified plagiarism machines. We believe in human creativity, curiosity, inspiration and the capacity to fail, and will only publish work written or created by humans.

As a small team of unpaid volunteer editors we are aware that we do not have the means to enforce this policy as other commercial magazines might, but we appeal to the humanity of our writers and readers. Literature has always been a conversation between humans across time and place, and we intend to keep it that way.

* No, running a spellchecker or grammar tool on your finished text is not AI.