There is a great deal of fear in the air these days, in the U.S., where the majority of our staff lives, and elsewhere. We are dedicated to continuing to support and promote voices from the margins. A very wise and kick-ass workshop leader once told our managing editor, Cait, that experimental forms like flash fiction and, more recently, the lyric essay exist as a malleable platform, to be claimed and transformed by the active voices in the writing field today. We're here to facilitate that transformation. We aim to create a platform on which urgent and articulate voices--female, queer, nonbinary, nonwhite--rise above the din. 

We are very much a new publication and as such, we are flexible in terms of content and open-minded in terms of submissions. We hope to discover work that will define the magazine, not the other way around. Please see our submission page for additional information and a more complete call for submissions. Community is the most important aspect of our mission. We hope to bring you, our writers and readers, one more powerful and reliable platform for resistance in the difficult years that lie ahead.

Sincerely,

The Mortar team

SOME USEFUL THINGS TO KNOW

• We'll be publishing two online issues a year.

• It is free to submit, and previous publications are neither a requirement nor something we'll actually take into account.

• We retain first serial rights to work published at Mortar. (That means the rights go back to the author, so they can go on to live in beautiful anthologies and other nice places.)

• We're on Twitter and Facebook!

• If you have an idea about something you'd like to see at Mortar, whether in terms of content or representation, we'd love to hear from you via the Contact page.

*We decided on the name for the magazine in a bar called Bar, when we noticed this mysterious stranger listening in on the other side of a threshold.