West Branch is accepting submissions for an inaugural themed nonfiction folio edited by Feature Editor Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn to be published in its Spring/Summer 2027 issue.
From the “white gold” of the Atlantic slave trade through ongoing farm subsidies, refined sucrose has had an undeniably far-reaching impact on American culture. Sugar appears not only as the dopamine-firing ingredient in so many of our foods, but also in so much of the English language. From the server at a diner hovering over an empty coffee mug—“Another cup, sugar?”—to terms like “sugar baby” and “syntactic sugar,” the word appears again and again as a marker of sweetness and ease that is rarely uncomplicated.
This call for submissions takes its title from a Matthea Harvey poem in which the speaker equates eating margarine sandwiches—rather than butter—as an attempt at avoiding the “iffy path” created by nuance and relationships. We’re interested in reading about sugar in all its difficult forms: literal, metaphorical, fake. Leslie Jamison argues in the essay “In Defense of Saccharin(e)” that “sugar and sweetener and text” are all satiating the same desire: to be “suddenly filled with a sensation beyond [ourselves].” Tell us about the day-to-day operations of a sugar beet field or the protocols of transporting insulin; recount the time you tasted every Jelly Belly flavor while blindfolded or visited Kara Walker’s A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Refinery; differentiate between the phenomena of Southern Hospitality and Midwestern Nice.
SOME PARTICULARS:
- Payment is awarded for accepted works in the amount of $0.10/wod of prose with a maximum payment of $200. Additionally, we provide each contributor with two copies of the issue in which their work appears and a one-year subscription to West Branch.
- Please send your Sugar submissions to this Google form between May 1st and June 30th. Anything received outside of this period will not be considered for publication.
- Include a brief cover letter, including an author bio, and the title(s) and word count(s) of your submission. Please also indicate if this is a simultaneous submission, and let us know if the work is accepted elsewhere by emailing (westbranch@bucknell.edu).
- Submissions should be no more than 7500 words of a single work. If you are submitting short-form essays, you may submit up to three pieces, so long as the total word count of all three pieces remains under 3750 words. All submissions should be double-spaced and paginated, with the author’s name on each page. Upload your submission/s to the form as a single .doc or .docx file. Decisions on the submissions will be made in the fall.
PLEASE USE THIS LINK TO SUBMIT