Call for Submissions
Summer 2025 Salish Magazine, Issue 28:
Berries
We are currently seeking articles, poetry, art, audio, photos, and videos related to “Berries” as parts of our ecosystem and connected to the Salish Sea region (see map photo below).
Right: madrone berries ripening. Above: dried madrone berry cut in half. photos by John F. Williams
We’re inviting a submission from you!
Salish Magazine tells stories related to things that people can see/hear firsthand, outdoors in our Salish Sea region. It ties specific nature topics into the larger ecosystem, and it includes lots of visuals and audio. Whether you’re an aspiring or seasoned journalist, artist, scientist, storyteller, poet, musician, or photographer, we’d love to hear from you.
summer 2025 Issue #28 theme: berries
The summer 2025 issue of Salish Magazine will explore the colorful, the juicy, and the seedy — that is, the lives and ecological roles of berries. Here are some example topics, feel free to build from these or propose your own:
- The many types of berries: different shapes and structures
- Interactions of berries and wildlife: food source, way to spread seeds, etc.
- Blackberries: natives and imports; how did they get here and how do they differ?
- What’s up with snowberry: white and waxy berries seem inedible so what is their ecological function?
We hope that those suggestions trigger your imagination…
But please note, we’re looking for content about berries in our ecosystem, not about human consumption of berries.
Salish Magazine strives to provide an ecosystem perspective and not just concentrate on a single subject. So we ask that contributors make their stories include interconnections between things, which are an essential part of the big picture.
DEADLINES
- Proposals due: April 21, 2025. These need only be a couple of sentences in an email to describe the general idea.
- First drafts due: May 14
- Final versions due: June 1
- First publication date: June 20: A few items will be published on this date, and other finalized submissions will be published throughout Spring
CONTACT
Please email submissions@salishmagazine.org to submit a proposal or if you have questions.
PROCEDURAL DETAILS
After receiving the first drafts, we will assign an editor to work with you to create the final draft. The first draft will also allow us to see what additional illustrations might be necessary, and we will issue a specific call for visuals if necessary.
Please see our Style Guide for details about the style we aspire toward:
https://salishmagazine.org/style-guid e/
Below is a brief summary.
FORMAT AND STYLE
- Prose articles should be around 1,000 to 2,000 words.
- For poetry submissions we haven’t set a guideline for the number of words.
- Please provide text files for poems or articles as Microsoft Word (.docx), Apple Pages (.pages) or generic text (.txt) file.
- If you are submitting imagery, please provide photographs/illustrations in high-resolution .jpg (at least 2048 pixels across). It would be best if the images contain some extra space around the subject so that we have some choices for cropping it to fit with the text layout. We like articles to be highly visual, and we usually can add photos if necessary.
- Videos, songs, poetry, photo essays, or types of media are also welcome; ask us about formatting requirements.
- We can send you a link to an online drive for uploading files if you have some that are too big to email.
- More details about the writing style, topic formulation, and geographic scope can be found in our online Style Guide For Authors.
BIO
We publish a short bio & photo of content contributors. Here are our bio guidelines:
For our readers, would you please submit a bio of around 200 words that references your experiences relevant to your contribution. It should be written in the third person. We would be happy to include a photograph of you, if you desire.
We would also be happy to include a relevant link to your web page, blog, or other reference that will help people find out more about you. We do not want to include advertisements.
Salish Magazine is a quarterly, advertisement free, online publication that reveals the interconnectedness of our natural world through…
visually rich stories…
about outdoor features…
in our Salish Sea region.
Salish Magazine strives to tell stories related to what people can see, or see at least parts or traces of, preferably in public forests, waters, and beaches around our Salish Sea region. We hope that when our readers personally encounter those sights, the stories they have read in Salish Magazine will come to mind, enabling them to see their surroundings in a new context — one that expands their knowledge of our Salish Sea ecosystem.
Articles should be easy to read for people who don’t know much about the subject and be more fun than academic — written as if you have a big smile on your face and want to share your ideas with a bunch of fun people. But we also encourage you to include sources so that readers can have a reason to find the story credible, and they can find additional information if they are interested in learning more. Some of our articles have links in the flow of the story as well as a list of other references at the end, for example:
If you’re more of a technical writer, we can help edit your work for our target audience. We welcome visual illustrations, and we have access to photographers and artists who can provide additional illustrations.
We are also trying to offer an alternative to the overwhelmingly people-centric media by not having people be the focus of our stories. We’ll leave the environmental policy, advocacy, agency projects, human benefits, and “how to” topics to other publishers. We’d like our content to tell our readers how nature works, and what they can see/experience exploring nature.
You can read more about our style recommendations at:
https://salishmagazine.org/style-guide/
PAYMENT
We don’t provide payment for submissions, but we are experimenting with small honoraria to show our appreciation.
PAST ISSUES
Please look at past issues (at: salishmagazine.org) to familiarize yourself with the kinds of articles that we publish.
CONTACT
Please email submissions@salishmagazine.org to submit a proposal or if you have questions.
Thank you for being part of Salish Magazine,
John F. Williams, Publisher