Diet Soap Submission Guidelines

We are primarily seeking radical nonfiction that explodes existing preconceptions. Of special interest would be critiques and attacks on capitalism, parapolitical journalism, and gonzo coverage of news events. We would love to publish your manifesto and help kick start your revolution. We will also consider short stories and poetry. We want art that confronts rather than comforts.

Some of our favorite essayists are George Orwell, Laura Riding, Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, Guy Debord, and Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. Fiction writers we enjoy would include Franz Kafka, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Philip K. Dick, John Barth, Octavia Butler, John Fante, Sinclair Lewis, and Kurt Vonnegut. The artists we want to list are Max Ernst, George Seurat, Gee Vaucher, Cindy Sherman, and mental patients. We like collage work and black and white drawings.

Diet Soap will publish one last themed issue on “Slavery,” and will then publish stories and essays online and in one annual print edition. Stories selected for the “Slavery” issue will appear online before the publication in print. Stories selected for publication may also be selected to be read on the Diet Soap Podcast. We pay a flat $5 honorarium for everything. Send your prose to douglain{at}dietsoap.org and your poetry to poetry{at}dietsoap.org. Please include the words “submission diet soap” in the subject line and your contact information in the attached word document or RTF.

Submissions that do not include contact information on the attached word file will be rejected silently and in secret. You will never hear from us if you don’t include contact information on your word file.

Submission deadline for Issue #4 (Theme: Slavery) is September 25th, 2009. Reprints are welcome.

“How To Write Stories About Writers” Submission Guidelines

Christopher Lasch, the author of “The Agony of the American Left,” and “The Culture of Narcissism” condemned modern and postmodern narrative techniques, especially metafictional approaches to literature. He wrote:

“Novelists and playwrights call attention to the artificiality of their own creations and discourage the reader from identifying with their characters. By means of irony and eclecticism, the writer withdraws from his subject but at the same time becomes so conscious of these distancing techniques that he finds it more and more difficult to write about anything except the difficulty of writing.” He went on to note that in a Narcissistic Culture “even the rich lose the sense of place and historical continuity, the subjective feeling of ‘entitlement’, which takes inherited advantages for granted. This gives way to what clinicians call ‘narcissistic entitlement’ — grandoise illusions, inner emptiness.”

At “How to Write Stories About Writers” we aim to take this moralist’s objections seriously even as we continue to employ ironic, subjective, and metafictional techniques in order to expose not only the literary devices that are employed in our own short stories but also those employed at work, in the family, in the shopping mall, in schools, and finally in society at large that reinforce our passivity and perpetuate what is ultimately a corrupt social order.

We are seeking stories about stories, literature about literature, and writers writing about writers. This is the publication for your narcissism, this is the publication for your alienation, this is the publication for your skepticism, for your fiction that is self-reflexive, ironic, dissociative, and wild.

Book reviews, interviews with authors, and literary criticism is also welcome.

“How to Write Stories about Writers” is on online publication at dietsoap.org. We seek stories and essays ranging between 500-4000 words. Stories published at “How to Write Stories about Writers” may also be selected to be read on the Diet Soap Podcast. We pay a flat $5 honorarium. Send submissions of all kinds to: howtowrite {at} dietsoap.org.