Greater Sum is a journal of prose and faith. This is meant to be interpreted broadly, with the art and the spirit guiding the submission and selection process. We accept fiction and narrative nonfiction, and encourage essays or other works of words, especially experimental forms. We don’t encourage poetry submissions at this time.
We encourage work by people of faith or that has faith as its subject—it need not be both and the connection need not be overt. We don’t want to be hit over the head by faith. Submissions do not have to be positive, and anything that smacks of superficiality will be immediately dismissed.
We believe art is best created in community, not in isolation. To that end, we work closely with our contributors through the editorial process as needed, and we encourage contributors and readers alike to comment on and share works.
Style and tone
Our first issue debuted in early 2017 and featured a variety of voices from across the U.S. You can read work from previous issues online here.
Beyond that, we’ll say this: Send us your experiments. Send us great dialogue. Send us deep and meaningful and shattered and repugnant and lovable characters. Send us a story that’s unexpected. Send us your weird and your classical and your fine-tuned. But whatever you send, do it with purpose.
Details
Greater Sum publishes in print twice per year: spring and fall. We publish additional work digitally on occasion. We accept submissions year-round.
There is no reading fee for submissions.
Our primary reading periods are November to January for the spring issue and May to July for the fall issue. During those periods we aim to respond within 6 weeks, but be aware that it can vary. Submissions outside those periods may take longer to get to.
Guidelines
We do not have a word count limit on submissions, believing that the length of a work should be determined by the needs of the story and not by some arbitrary cutoff. Be aware, however, that we expect our readers’ investment of time to be rewarded. Make it worth our time to read.
Submit original, unpublished work for which you hold the rights. We do accept simultaneous submissions, but notify us immediately of acceptance elsewhere.
Submissions not meeting our guidelines will be immediately rejected.
As part of our mission, we plan to eventually perform group readings and/or workshops with editors and willing contributors. If you’re interested in performing a reading of your submission, please note such when you submit.
Get it to us
PLEASE NOTE: We are currently experiencing some intermittent issues with our submissions manager. Please consider using email to send submissions until these issues are resolved. Thanks!
We prefer that you submit via our submission manager, but you are welcome to mail or email submissions.
You may send a Word, RTF, or PDF document through our submission manager or send via email.
Mail printed submissions to:
Greater Sum Journal
1004 W Willow St.
Walla Walla, WA 99362
What do we like? We like work that challenges assumptions, opens up new ideas, asks questions, and pushes beyond the status quo—and we especially like work that does this in interesting ways.
Rights
We request the exclusive first right to publish your work in the print publication and/or a digital version or versions of the publication and/or on our website, as well as the nonexclusive right to reprint or republish the work on our website, via social media, in live performance, in promotional materials and in an anthology or anthologies. All other rights remain with the author.
Contributors receive two complimentary print copies of the issue in which their work appears. We are able to provide a small honorarium to contributors.