September 4, 2025
Baltimore Review News: All the contributors in Baltimore Review 2025 should have their copies soon. I’ve seen a few people share photos of the book on social media. Always a joy to see that.
We opened our micro category on September 1 and will close it on September 14. All responses by September 30. As always, no fee to submit (but I send our list of 65 writing prompts plus tips if someone donates $5—of which we get $3.76 and Submittable gets $1.24), and we’ll pay for accepted work at our usual rate of $50. So far—in just four days—we’ve received 165 micro submissions. Wow. And a number of these have gathered Yes votes from our editors. Repeat, in just four days. I have a feeling this special section in our fall issue is going to be amazing. But selecting a reasonable number to publish is not going to be easy if these Yes votes keep piling up.
Work in all the usual categories—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction—will be considered for the fall issue as well.
I have four Zoom meetings scheduled with the BR staff members to review the micro submissions. We all work remotely and independently in Submittable, but I find some face time (Zoom time) invaluable. We learn so much from each other.
A few criteria we take into consideration, similar to those for our short forms contests:
Clarity, concision, precision, authority, evidence of the writer’s skill with language and grasp of subject matter. We should feel that we’re in capable hands when we read the work. We can slow down and enjoy the writing; it would likely be a pleasure to read it out loud.
Does the work fit the short-form genre? Would the work be better suited to a longer form? Maybe it feels like the writer has a lot to say but is squeezing it into 400 words to fit the category. Or narrative lift-off is taking too long. Or the work doesn’t end well. You’re left unsatisfied. The work should have a tight focus; there’s usually no space in the short form for going off on tangents—unless those tangents serve a purpose and enrich the work; they’re clearly part of a design, the architecture of the work.
Is the content fresh, original, surprising—or address a familiar subject in an unexpected way? If it delivers a message, does it do so without feeling heavy handed, agenda driven?
The short-form work can be a tightly compressed narrative, stream of consciousness, burst of emotion through images, or something experimental, like a set of operating instructions or a classified ad. The possibilities are endless. Short forms are a wonderful license to experiment, e.g., when writing a prose poem, for the prose writer to be more playful with language and for the poet to write without the constraint of lines. When experimenting with forms, think about how that form (such as a recipe or prayer) may, or may not, enrich the meaning of the work. Does the form fit the content? Does the experimental form cloud the meaning? Or does the form enhance the work and provide an experience that would have been lost in a more traditional form?
On a personal note: Last March, I had the pleasure of presenting a session on “Concision and Precision in Flash Fiction” at the Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA) Bay to Ocean Writers Conference. An excellent conference! So I submitted a proposal for the 2026 conference. May not fly since I think they might prefer to have fresh presenters and not too many repeaters—but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Since my last session was fairly serious, I thought I’d try more of a games approach, with the main goal of having writers “leave the session feeling that writing is a joyful process, with endless possibilities for story-making and imagination-nurturing even in the small spaces we have for this in our daily lives.” If nothing else, I reminded myself of all the ways I’ve managed to take a playful approach to my own writing over the years (Tarot cards, interrogating my story ideas as if they were crime suspects, flowcharts and bubble charts, Magic 8 Ball, so many prompts, switching forms and even genres, to name a few), and the way I managed to complete some respectable poems and short stories—some up around 4,000 words—in stolen moments on scraps of paper and post-it notes and snippets of text across scattered computer files. This is not crazy, people. This is writing in real life. And if it isn’t fun, well, I could try something else. Not piano. I was terrible at piano. No, writing can be fun. Seriously.
And I continue to look at my own Submittable submissions way too much and get a little kick out of seeing them change from “Received” to “In Progress.” Even though, as an editor myself, I know this only means that someone has voted/commented/assigned my work to someone to read. Some action has been taken. That’s it. I also know that editors can read my work without the status changing to “In Progress.” I’ll say one thing for journals that take emailed submissions or use some other system. Nips that obsessive system-checking right in the bud.
Getting an urge to write a lineated poem again. Missing the magic you can conjure with line breaks.