Submissions
DEADLINE: February 16, 2025
What are we looking for?
We are looking for high-quality pieces by passionate writers and artists from the USask community — students, staff, faculty and alumni are all welcome to submit their work.
No previous experience is required, as submissions are considered on the piece’s merits alone.
What are you thinking about? What worries you? What moves you? We want to hear the voices that make up this university and help put their work out into the world.
Scroll down, or click one of the following buttons, to learn how to submit to in medias res.
Categories
We publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art pieces. Any form of written or artistic expression that can be appreciated in a physical magazine or a website will be considered for publication.
We will happily consider mixed media pieces (e.g., graphic novels and comics, illustrated stories and poems, photo essays) for publication. In the case where your work blurs the lines between genres, we would encourage you to submit to the category that you believe best describes your piece.
Finally, we will consider works written in languages other than English (so long as a translation is provided for our editors/readers). We will also consider English translations of public-domain works originally written in another language.
Fiction refers to narrative stories, told through prose, about imaginary events and people. We accept writing from all genres.
Examples:
- Very short stories
- Two-sentence story
- Post-card stories
- Microfiction (~300 words)
- Flash fiction (under 750 words)
- Short stories
- Folk tales, legends, and myths
- Excerpts from a longer work, such as a novella or novel
Nonfiction refers to prose writing about real events or ideas. We accept creative nonfiction alongside other approaches to telling nonfiction. While in medias res is not a newspaper nor an academic journal, we are a liberal arts journal and thus invite prose pieces exploring real life topics, issues, and questions.
Examples:
- Creative nonfiction, including:
- Personal essays
- Flash nonfiction (under 750 words)
- Hermit crab essays (an essay that borrows another form to tell its story)
- Lyric essay (essay depending heavily on poetic techniques
- Expository and/or persuasive nonfiction, including:
- Opinion pieces and editorials
- Articles and brief essays
- Edited transcriptions of interviews
- Book reviews
- Excerpts from a longer work of nonfiction
Poetry is a genre that focuses on language and form to convey meaning. Some poems use rhyme and meter as their vehicle to build meaning, other poems are less restricted by these conventions.
Examples:
- Fixed-form poetry: sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, palindromes, etc.
- Lyric poetry
- Found poetry (a.k.a. erasure poetry)
- Translations of poems from other languages
- Excerpts from a memoir or novel written in verse
- Spoken word poetry and songs*
Visual art is a vast category of the fine arts that includes any artistic expression that can be represented in a physical magazine.
Examples:
- Drawings, paintings, and digital art
- Photography and photo collages
- Photographs of three-dimensional work of art (e.g., sculpture, installation art)
- Stills from an animated short movie or video installation*
* We are open to including links to pieces that have a video component, so long as a physical representation of the piece can be included in the magazine and the video can be uploaded to the in medias res website (a precaution to prevent link rot).
Submission Limits
Each contributor is allowed to submit up to two pieces of work, not totaling more than:
- Five (5) magazine pages of written material, OR;
- Two (2) magazine pages of artistic material, OR;
- Five (5) magazine pages of written and artistic material combined
Choose up to two (2) from the following list (you can submit to the same category twice!):
- Fiction: 1500 words max.
- Nonfiction: 1500 words max.
- Poetry: 1 poem, 2 pages max.
- Visual art: 1 piece
- Fiction: 3000 words max.
- Nonfiction: 3000 words max.
- Poetry: a series of thematically connected poems OR one long poem, 5 pages max.
- Visual art: a collection of related pieces OR multiple photographs of a piece that cannot be easily captured in one photograph
Formatting Guidelines
Rules
- There must be no identifying information in your submitted document.
- For written works:
- Single-spaced, 12 pt Times New Roman with 1 inch margins
- Must be submitted as doc or docx file
- Include the title of your piece at the top of the document
- While we will consider prose pieces up to 150 words over the word limit, you will be expected to meet the word limit by the time of publication.
- If you are including visual media in your writing, please include the photos in the document approximately where you would like them to appear. If your work is accepted, we will ask for separate image files.
- For artistic works:
- Visual art submissions should be a photograph (or photographs) of your work, taken in the highest resolution possible.
- We prefer jpeg or png files
- Failure to follow the submission limit will result in all your pieces being withdrawn from consideration.
Considerations
To make life easier for our editors, we encourage you to name your files according to the following format:
- Fiction: F_title
- Nonfiction: NF_title
- Poetry: P_title
- Visual Art: VA_title
- Poetry Collection: P_collection title
- Visual Art Collection (please name each piece): VA_collection title 1, VA_collection title 2, etc.
Submit here!
We use Google Forms to collect submissions. This ensures that the editorial process is a blind-review (that is, we examine your piece without knowing who submitted it).
Part of the submission process is including a brief contributor bio (1-4 sentences) about yourself. These are usually written in the third person. If you need inspiration, feel free to look at the back page of past in medias res issues. These issues can be found on our website or on distribution racks located throughout STM college.
Note: Once you have made a submission, you cannot change it. Should you wish to withdraw or update your submission, please contact us at inmediasres@stmcollege.ca
Winter Issue (issue no. 2)
Submissions for our fall issue closed November 15.
We are currently collecting submissions for our second issue. Click on the following button to submit your piece(s).
Submissions close February 16th, 2025. We look forward to seeing your work!