Submissions

Magical Realist Eco-Fiction Anthology

We are currently taking submissions for a magical realist eco-fiction anthology centered on finding and examining “the sublime” and “the unknown” within our daily lives, and/or addressing the ways in which we interact with them.

We’re looking for eco-poetic prose musings, fantastical short stories, and fictionalized memoirs that lead readers to reconsider the spaces – both natural and manufactured – we encounter and reside in.

Submissions open until February 1st, 2023.
4,000 words maximum per story, and up to two stories allowed per submitter.
We will pay submitters $50/story for accepted work.

Submit work by emailing bluecactuspress@gmail.com. Label your submissions as follows in the subject line: Sublime_[Title]_[Last Name]. Do not include your writing in the body of the email. Include it as an attachment in .pdf, .doc, or .docx format.

General Submissions

We’re accepting rolling submissions for full-length manuscripts by women, transgender and gender-nonconforming People of Color in the Pacific Northwest. We’re primarily interested in non-fiction works, including poetry, but will consider fiction if the content is in conversation with other works from our catalog. We’re particularly interested in works related to:

Regional/cultural history from non-dominant cultural perspectives
Chicano/a voices and experiences
Queer parenting / birthwork
Death Doulas
Immigration / Deportation
Non-traditional romance

Please include a cover letter with your manuscript addressing the following:

How your work connects to our mission statement and engages in conversation with other works from our catalog
Recurring themes in your manuscript
What you hope to accomplish via publication

Send your cover letter and manuscript to bluecactuspress (at) gmail (dot) com. Manuscripts should be sent in Microsoft word (.doc or .docx) format, in 12 point, Times New Roman font. For prose, please ensure your work is double-spaced. For poetry, please send your work spaced/placed as it is intended to be read on the page.

Submitted manuscripts will be considered for 2023 and 2024 publication. We will try our best to personally respond to your submission within three months of receiving your work. However, depending on the volume of submissions, we may not be able to.

If you are not a woman, transgender and gender-nonconforming person of color, we will not read or respond to your submission. We value and respect a diversity of voices in our community, however, we are intent on building spaces and dialogue in which marginalized voices are centered.

books

Browse our books below, as well as some from like-minded presses and authors of the Pacific Northwest. Your purchase allows our collaborators — including authors, artists, designers, editors, marketers, and printers — to thrive.

Maps

3rd Edition Maps is the transmutation of Christina Vega’s debut poetry collection — and the book that started it all at Blue Cactus — Still Clutching Maps. First published in 2017, this pocket-sized poetry collection explores Vega’s cultural and geographic roots as a Chicana in the American Southwest. Vega sends readers down a path of memories, dreams, and warnings, asking them to witness the liminality of borderland existence. The poems in this collection, whether by omission, change, or preservation, illuminate Vega’s lived experiences as their queerness, cultural frameworks, and home drift toward and away from borderlands.

$20.00

Single-Parent Writing Workshop

Join storyteller, consultant, and poet Christina Vega for a generative writing workshop for single parents. Participants can expect to generate new writing, witness and share stories of transformation surrounding parenting and creativity, and engage in guided self-reflection exercises aimed at creative self-actualization. Participants will receive a workshop chapbook with guided writing exercises, poems and essays by local single-parent working writers, and coloring pages for moments of rest and relaxation.

Suggested price: $50.00

Choose price

Confessions of a Modern-Day Kumiho

by Alissa Tu Publication Date: Feb. 14th, 2022 Kumiho: A nine-tailed fox who transforms into a woman to seduce men and eat their livers or hearts. Sometimes, a man’s heart isn’t enough. As her inner Kumiho takes over, Alissa Tu is equal parts triumphant in conquest and terrifying in love’s inevitable collapse. Each attempt to satisfy the Kumiho entangles Alissa more deeply in her alter-ego’s devouring scheme. Can she reconcile with her animalistic counterpart, or will she remain forever bound and disembodied? This unapologetic memoir dissects— with bloody, fragmented incision—the shit-show of searching for love in our digital world.

$15.00 – $20.00

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A Summoning

Can we exorcise a memory? Can we purge those that are a danger to us? Rewriting moments of trauma while coming to terms with a family in the early stages of memory loss, A Summoning muddles the line between fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, text and image. Each segment is fragmented but fluid, weaving in and out to show how malleable and unreliable memory can be; how it manifests in the body, mentally, physically, emotionally; how it mutates and betrays as we age. A conceptual, psychological experiment focused on memory, Nicole McCarthy’s collection lays the groundwork explaining the physiology…

$20.00

You Are More Than Your Body

Published by Monique Ferrer Published Sep. 2022 There is no easy or correct way to process grief and loss. You Are More Than Your Body was created to help women that have experienced loss related to their body through insightful writing prompts and activities. This inviting journal is a space to reflect, process, and continue your healing journey. It’s time to make peace with our grief. This journal includes over 20 writing prompts related to grief and loss, affirmation activities, and more.

$20.00

Anatomy of My Mixed Body

Mainstream American culture asks us to label and define ourselves in clearly marked, rigid boxes. But definitions, meaning, and identity are always shifting. The only thing that lingers in their wake is the impact we, the meaning makers, have on the people and places we encounter. Anatomy of My Mixed Body is an eco-poetic conversation led by Katharine Threat, in which she addresses lived experiences of displacement and homecoming, and imagines a world in which seemingly disparate pieces of land and identity converge into one body. Threat’s poems demonstrate the possibility of reconciliation of the mixed body that is all…

$20.00

The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory & Contemplative Practice of Media Art

by Marilyn Freeman Published by The 3rd Thing In this fragmentary and fluent little gem, writer and time-based artist Marilyn Freeman offers up their own contemplative practice of dowsing for and creating “opportune moments” of insight and healing. With humor and humility, Freeman reveals their innovative approach to making video essays, a process developed over years of art-making, study and personal searching—a process of waking up again and again to the extraordinary possibilities hidden in everyday existence.

$28.00

Submissions

Magical Realist Eco-Fiction Anthology

General Submissions

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