Submit your art and writing to Seedlings

Open call for art and writing 

Seedlings magazine is looking for art & writing on the topic of FOOD for our next issue, Seedlings VI. As ever, we are particularly interested in work with a focus on nature, craft and queerness. Seedlings VI will explore FOOD in the full circle of life, from source to feeding and from waste to fertilising. 

Submissions could include:

* a poem about a special meal

* recipes of broths, stews with mushrooms or kelp

* an essay about farming or forestry

* food photos

* memoir about growing up among fishers

* a linocut of samphire

** or anything you feel is relevant, interesting and beautiful!

We are also open for art & writing for SEEDPOD, a new mini zine of nature art & writing. It is a rolling deadline, printing as and when we have enough content we love. The zine will be A6 and one colour (i.e., black & white or brown on cream paper), so please bear this in mind when submitting photos or drawings.

Submit here

This is the link to the form.

Seedlings is open for submissions on a rolling basis. This means you can submit anytime for upcoming magazine issues and books.

We believe this allows us to be more open with our community of artists and writers. It means we can be in touch before the deadline with feedback if we’d like some edits or tweaks to your work before we start printing, allowing us to develop your work with you, rather than the old-fashioned binary of acceptance/rejection.

Submission details

Full guidelines are below and we will have messages soon with other top tips for submitting and what details we love to see.

We are also organising physical submissions to a U.K. PO Box, more info soon.

It’s free to submit, but we would really appreciate a donation of £2 to help us through the process. We'd love the art and literary worlds to be far more nurturing and open for creativity than they are, and so have decided once again not to charge for submissions. If you did wanted to support us though we are accepting donations at the link below. Just £2 would be really welcome as we are running Seedlings alongside our day jobs and the process takes so much work behind the scenes! If you also wanted feedback in this submission round, we'd appreciate a donation too, but we understand some people can't spare the £2 at this time.

We will offer all selected artists and writers a fee if possible, calculated once we know the finances each particular magazine (every issue is different!). We will also sell prints on our site and split those profits 50-50 with the artist.

Writing Submissions

Seedlings is a handmade book and the type is printed using letterpress. Due to the small dimensions of our book we have to be quite precise with word counts in the main. If your piece is longer we could print it, but the content and quality would have to justify the extra pages.

We accept submissions on a rolling basis, and are particularly interested in nature writing, queer pieces, microfiction and interesting use of form.

Poetry - please send no more than five poems. We would prefer poetry to be less than 22 lines (including line breaks). Longer poetry will be considered, but as stated above, it will be less likely to be included in the final edit as it will take two or more pages.

Prose, stories - please send stories up to 1,000 words. We do accept essays and journalism but would like them to be closely associated with our ethos and values, with a touch of the lyrical.

We love analogue forms - typography, typewriting, handwriting and calligraphy. If you’d like to send a physical copy with your work, please email your submission first and we will reply with an address you can send your piece to!

You are welcome to send us things that have been published elsewhere so long as you have full rights over the work. Similarly, please don’t send work derived from any copyright material that you do not have rights to use. If unsure, please research the rights of the material you wish to use or adapt.

To send us your writing please submit your work as a .docx (preferred) or .pdf.

Art Submissions

We are keen to see a wide range of art across a range of mediums and styles. We would especially like to see work using natural and eco-friendly materials. Please send no more than five pieces, but feel free to link your website or portfolio.

Please include in your submission email:

• the name and date of each of your pieces

• the medium and/or creation process

If you have work that you’d like to reproduce with eco-friendly materials but haven’t currently got the funds, then please submit your work as it is, and tell us how you envision recreating it. We may be able to fund you.

To send us your art please upload your work.

What we are looking for

Seedlings is looking for the real, the secret, the sacred, the alternative – what ‘natural’ means to you or the authentically artificial – the wisdom of your years or your teenage attempt at freedom – a portrait of your garden and its own memories of you – what you learnt from humiliation – your grandad’s last forgotten apple core from that holiday in Lowestoft – the alley between the garages where you were foraged brambles – the bench where you sat and listened to the whole of the the whole of the moon – the way your partner clicked their heels when you dropped them home after your first date – which flower means hope and which means hunger – the paw-prints of a fleeing fox – rewarded faith.

For more specific details of what form this could take — please read on below.