Submissions for Issue 2 of Not Quite Right Literary Magazine will open on July 1, 2026, and we’re excited to announce the theme:
fixed forms (loosely)
For our second issue, we’re looking for work that begins with a recognizable form . . . and then misbehaves.
A villanelle that refuses to circle back cleanly. A sonnet with commitment issues. A limerick that haunts the room. A dirge that celebrates. A résumé for a life you never lived. A job application to become someone else. A personal ad addressed to your own grief. A prayer, a recipe, a rejection letter, an obituary, a confession, a spell.
We want pieces that understand form not as a cage, but as a dare.
For fixed forms (loosely), we’re interested in writing that identifies with a tradition, structure, genre, or template, and then expands it, bends it, defies it, breaks it, or uses it against itself. This might mean formal poetry that plays with inherited rules, prose that borrows from bureaucratic or everyday documents, hybrid work that disguises itself as something else entirely, or visual art that uses recognizable structure as a starting point for rupture.
We are not looking for perfect obedience. We are looking for tension.
What happens when a love poem sounds like a legal notice? When a death threat is addressed to the self? When a limerick stops being funny but keeps its little song? When a dirge refuses to mourn? When a form built for order becomes a place for disorder?
Send us the work that knows the rules and chooses which ones to betray.
We’re open to poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid work, visual art, and pieces that are difficult to categorize. We welcome traditional forms, invented forms, anti-forms, documents, lists, applications, notes, prayers, instructions, threats, apologies, advertisements, questionnaires, and anything else that uses form as part of its meaning.
As always, Not Quite Right is drawn to work that feels alive, strange, sincere, unsettling, funny, tender, precise, excessive, restrained, or impossible to file neatly away.
Submissions for Issue 2 open July 1, 2026.
Full guidelines will be available on our submissions page before the reading period begins. Until then, we invite you to think about the forms you’ve inherited, the forms you’ve been forced into, the forms you love, the forms you resent, and the forms you might like to ruin beautifully.
We can’t wait to see what you make of them.
— Not Quite Right Literary Magazine