Antiserious, as you know, is anti-spotlight. A magazine that was specifically founded to challenge the authoritarian rule of the SERIOUS. This gives away what we are: a magazine that celebrates works and thoughts that are unfinished, fragmented, amateur. We are a magazine that strives to exist on the margins.
What we are reading now
Antiserious is currently in its non-reading period. Please wait till we announce a new call for submission. Any submission sent during the non-reading period will not be acknowledged.
What to send
We accept essays, creative nonfiction, short fiction, poetry, illustrations, photo features for our Quarterly publication. But we will also accept graphic stories, scripts of plays and movies, recipes from under-represented places and communities, profiles and interviews and anything under the moon that tells your story and appeals to us.
We request that you go through our magazine once before you approach us.
In essays, we are looking for writings that speak about personal experiences and interpretations. We are not interested in wordy, academic essays or your opinion on government policies, tax reforms or the state of cinema. There are better places for that. But we are very interested in knowing what these things do to you. Tell us about the evolution of Aam Aadmi Party’s jhaadu, how it travelled from your mother’s hands to Arvind Kejriwal’s. Tell us, for example, about your feminist grandmother. Or, how about how Chetan Bhagat changed your love life?
We do not review books. But we are interested in things like if Agastya’s (from English, August) almost pathological lying reminded you of something or someone you have experienced in your life, or perhaps lived with, we’d like to read about that. We’d like you tell us if you could look at yourself through another writer, or another character, if you’d like to tell us about a book that changed your taste in music, or a book that made you try out new recipes (no, not cook books) that would be lovely too. So send us quirky pieces and we’d be happy to publish them.
If you choose to write on cinema, think of the themes that you could possibly write on. How body, and desire are represented in a film you love? What roles do rains play? What about the dark winters? What happened to the sweaty armpit marks on the clothes of our actors?
We request you to send us pitches instead of complete essays. This gives us an idea of what you will be writing. This also makes us feel less cruel about turning down a contribution.
The Food section is one of our latest attempts at diversifying our magazine. In this section we encourage you to send us recipes that you think we should know. You can also send us essays that tell us stories about your engagement with that food. We welcome pohas as much as we welcome beef curies and pitikas.
We are interested in profiles and interviews but not of the usual kind. We do not want you to send us interview/ profile of a Bollywood star or a renowned politician. We will be very interested if you can profile that guy from your neighbourhood kirana store and tell us something about him we should know. Tell us about that samosa maker who has been making amazing samosas since three decades in a small town without being Zomato-ed.
We strongly believe that there are stories and story-makers around us in places we never see. So get your notepad or your recorder and tell us what we can learn from your interview with your grandfather, your aunt, your mother.
We have also started working on our long-pending wish for poetry in translation. At this point, we are looking for translation of poems from Indian languages to English. We require you to have taken the permission of the original writer before you send us their work. (Here’s Hemant Divate’s poem from our first quarterly issue, if you need examples.)
For our Blog, we are looking for trivia pieces, rare interviews and writings from yesteryears— in video and text format. You can also send us rumours that you used to hear once upon a time. You can also send us topical poems and short essays. You can also send us a list of songs on a particular theme along with 200–300 words of what the songs are about and links to them — the songs can be in any language.
For Blog pitches, you can get in touch with Debojit Dutta (debojit@antiserious.com) or Manjiri Indurkar (manjiri@antiserious.com) to submit to this section.
Remember: we cannot publish indented poems or stories on Medium. So, we request you to send us works that do not require indenting. Otherwise, along with your content, we will have to use a PDF file retaining your formatting like this — see the link at the end of the story.
How much to send
While there is no particular word limit for submissions, we encourage you send us longer essays and short stories for the Quarterly. The magazine part of Antiserious would like to concentrate on longform, for shorter essays there’s our Blog.
Poems: Try to send us at least three poems. But we do not discourage you from submitting if you have one really good poem.
Short fiction: Submit one fiction story at a time. Please use MS Word format.
Essays: Stick to longform. A lower limit of 2000 words is ideal. We are yet to decide the upper limit. So, write long.
Illustrations and photo essays: Please do not send us a single photo or an illustration. We would not know what to do with it. Unless, that photo or piece of illustration is a story in itself.
Where to send
Please send all your submissions, unless it is for the Blog, ONLY to editorial@antiserious.com. Refrain from writing to particular editors.
Please include a short bio in the body of the email that tells us who you are. Refrain from addressing your email to particular editors.
In the subject line of the email, please mention the section you are submitting to. Like “Fiction submission: Story Title” is encouraged, “Guess What This is About” is not.
Reading period
For the Quarterly: August 1 to January 31. Though we are making an exception for the BODY/ BODY ODOUR issue.
For the Blog: On a rolling basis. That means throughout the year.
Payment
We are still unable to pay our contributors. But we hope, as you do, to change this in the future.
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