Work-It Wednesday: Spotlighting Newfound

On my hopefully one and only Work-It Wednesday, I’m grooving on niche.

I’m scrambling over here in DailyShortyland this week, and didn’t have the stillness nor focus to do my Market Monday duty. So today is “Work-It Wednesday,” my make-up date with you, reader, if you’re looking for markets worthy of your best, very short prose. I give you Newfound, a journal devoted to work that “explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding.” And oh, how well they do that.

Do I like what they publish? Their flash pieces, which they define as no more than 1,000 words, are rich and varied. And unless I missed something, they don’t mark their flashes as fiction or creative nonfiction, so they get to sit wherever they want in your imagination. Really good micros and flashes are bursting at the seams with subtext, and the current issue’s “An Ode to Delmar” by Jamie Wagman gleefully pops stitches from top to bottom. I love the focus on one narrow subject, which of course serves as the window into a world of subjects, in Issue 3’s (Vo. 7, Fall) “In the Epoch of the King Salmon” by Paul Vega. And the compression and fierceness of that same issue’s “Verily, Verily” by Sarah Kathryn Moore makes me weak with admiration.

Do they do justice to the published work? They make it easy to find and access each flash published online, in current and previous online issues, and each piece lives on its own, tidy page.

Do their guidelines speak to me? When I first checked out Newfound, what excited me right away is their very brief statement of what they look for in flash prose: “Flash fiction, micro fiction, and hybrid work—if it’s brief (<1,000 words) and cutting edge, we’re publishing it.” I’m always interested in magazines looking for something outside traditional, realist fiction, because I often write this kind of fiction and I love to read it. And note that here they do specifically use the word “fiction,” but they also refer to “hybrid work,” which must be at the root of why they don’t label the flashes. I could be misunderstanding their intent, but if so, I’m glad. This stated openness to “hybrid work,” and the lack of labels for the flash prose—they allow a clean approach to each flash, that, for me, acts on the work, making it fill more space and suggest more meaning.

It all makes me rue my tendency to very rarely give place any attention in my work. What about you? If you’ve got a flash that focuses on place, fire it off to Newfound. They accept submissions year-round. And if they publish it, please report back here so I can applaud.

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Tags: Jamie Wagman, Newfound, Paul Vega, Sarah Kathryn Moore