Editor’s Notes

Greetings Dear Readers,

The three poems in our September issue take us on a slow journey of ice cream and honey, love, graffiti, and sliced avocado with cling wrap and a minotaur. Our poets evoke our aging bodies and our younger selves.

How are you coping now that we have passed the six-month mark of the pandemic? What are you reading? Are you writing poetry? Don't forget to send it to us for the next submission call. You can send us poems any time and they will be considered for the next issue. One of the lovely things about a monthly poetry magazine is that it has a voracious appetite for poetry. Please read the guidelines on the site and if you're eligible, please send us poems. I welcome any queries regarding your submissions at any time.

Here are some reminders for the preparation of the submission. For the cover letter, include a current mailing address and telephone number. We pay our honoraria by cheque, which we mail on the publication date, the fifteen of the month. Your phone number also helps us to reach you if we can't get through to you via e-mail, which happens on occasion.

Since Bywords.ca requires contributors to have a connection to Ottawa, if your address is not in Ottawa, please provide information about your connection to the City. You can be a former resident, student, or worker.

Please include a brief biography in the third person. If you haven't written a biography before, you can consult the biographies of poets published in Bywords.ca. Visit the current issue or the archives or the writers' index to get an idea of how to write a bio.

The preferred formats for the poetry submissions our MS Word .doc or .docx files, but if you don't use Word, you can provide ODT or RTF files. Please don't send me to your Google drive. Provide the poems as one e-mail attachment with your name as a filename [LAST_FIRST.docx]. Please do not send PDFs. Please do not send poems that require a lot of tricky formatting. Alignment issues between a word processing program and a site can be difficult and we don't have the resources to spend a lot of time on such. You can always review previous issues of the magazine by visiting the archives.

Please send us unpublished poems. This means your poems must not have been self-published in print or online on social media or on a blog or published in any print publication. We pay an honorarium for first North American publication rights, and after the work has been published, you are free to send it elsewhere if the publication doesn't require first publication rights. You can submit work simultaneously to us and other journals whose guidelines allow for simultaneous submission.

When you e-mail your submission to us, you receive a userid and a password that allows you to revoke any poems that end up being published elsewhere. You will receive an acknowledge of your submission within 48 hours or less of its receipt in my e-mail box. You will receive an acceptance or rejection within three months. Once we have rejected the poem, please do not resubmit it.

Finally, please ensure you send us a final version of the poems, rather than having to ask for changes, especially major changes to the work. We will correct a typo and a formatting error but reserve the right to reject a poem where major changes have been made, even after we've accepted it. The poems accepted were considered as is by our selection committee, not with substantive changes made later.

Poems published on Bywords.ca are considered for the John Newlove Poetry Award. The recipient and honourable mentions are contacted in late August, we hold the ceremony in October, and we publish their chapbook the following year.

We're finalizing the plans for our 2020 John Newlove Poetry Award Ceremony and Reading which will take place via Zoom as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. All of the information will be on our calendar of events and also on the Festival's program soon. In the meantime, I can let you on a scoop. Our musician of the evening will be Kimberly Sunstrum, a queer, Afro-Canadian neo-soul, folk artist I first heard perform at a Qu'Arts event a few years ago. We will be launching David Groulx's chapbook, What the Haruspex read in the Small hours of my Body, and of course we'll announce the honourable mentions and recipients of this year's award and hear them read.

Thanks to our selection committee this month:

Jesse Aubin
Wes Babcock
Robert Martin Evans
Margo Lapierre
Kemisha Newman
Helen Robertson
Marjorie Silverman
Carol A. Stephen
JC Sulzenko

If you have questions, comments, suggestions or a good pot of strong coffee to offer, please e-mail me at amanda@bywords.ca.

Amanda Earl
Managing Editor

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