Submission Guidelines

GUTS is currently currently accepting pitches for our REVENGE issue until March 31, 2022.

GUTS magazine publishes literary essays and reviews, long-form journalism, interviews, fiction, and new media that advance feminist correspondence, criticism, and community in Canada. The content we publish is typically informal and accessible. Depending on the form, pieces could range from 500 to 3,000 words. You can visit our back issues and previously published work to get a better idea of what we are looking for.

Send a short pitch (100-300 words) to submit@gutsmagazine.ca outlining your idea, and giving us a sense of your ability to execute it. Please also include a writing sample or links to your previous work. Our editorial board reviews all submissions to the magazine, and we do our best to respond to all inquiries and pitches.

We are currently not accepting and publishing pieces on an ongoing basis, and will be working on themed issues. We are currently accepting pitches for our REVENGE issue until March 31, 2022.

Work We’re Proud of 

To get a sense of what we are looking for, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the kinds of work we publish. Here, referencing some of our favourite pieces, we explain the kinds of writing we want to publish:

Politics: We want pieces that engage with Canadian policy, law, politics, labour, or activism in relation to feminist praxis. This has looked like Ontario Midwives Demand Pay Equity by Cynthia Spring and A Real Estate Ghost Story by Nisa Malli. We are not usually able to respond to news events immediately, so we are especially interested in pieces that contextualize current political happenings in a historical context or through personal narrative. Kai Cheng Thom’s piece Not Yet is a great example of this kind of work.

Culture: We are looking for timely, accessible, playful-but-critical reflections on television, film, literature, memes, and other cultural phenomena, much like Sally Yue Lin’s Laughing in the Dark: Watching Melanated Films with White People, Jessica Johns’s Interview with Evan Ducharme, and Cheryl Thompson’s Canada’s Black Beauty Culture is More than a Politics.

Lives: We love the stories only you can tell, told in the way that makes sense to you. We publish short, critical memoirs, reflections, and personal essays that build connections between personal experiences and larger social forces. Almah LaVon Rice’s Watcher Within Watchers Without: My Black OCD Story is really strong examples of this kind of work.

Poetry, Fiction, and Comics:

We love artistic work that offers innovative ways of seeing the world. That can include short fiction, poetry, comics, video art, and more. Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer, Samantha Marie Nock’s poems, and the My Gender is Saturn Return comic series from JB Brager and Cee Lavery are all strong examples of art that gave us new frames of reference. 

For poetry submissions, please send no more than three poems with a brief note, if you want to contextualize the poems, or to tell us about yourself and the work.

If your idea doesn’t fall within these categories, but you think it’s a good fit for GUTS, pitch us anyway!

Compensation

Compensation will be provided for contributors selected and ranges from $500 to $2000, depending on length and depth of the work. We will provide a quote upon acceptance of your pitch. If you think you have a strong long form, investigative piece that falls outside this pay scale, pitch us anyways and we can negotiate rates.