Antiphony accepts submissions from both emerging and established authors year-round, and they aim to respond to all submissions within one month. Poets may submit one to five poems, and should wait at least three months between submissions. Antiphony nominates authors for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize.

Antiphony is also open to pitches (300 words or fewer) for reviews, interviews, short and long-form criticism, close reads, and comparative essays. These will be published as supplements to the journal.

They also accept book manuscripts. Before submitting a full-length manuscript, authors should send a five-page excerpt, cover letter, and bio. Book manuscript submissions close on November 1, 2024. Authors of full-length manuscripts chosen for publication will receive a $500 honorarium.

Antiphony accepts submissions via email, not online or by post. They accept simultaneous submissions but ask that authors withdraw writing published elsewhere. They do not accept previously published work.

Antiphony only accepts submissions that follow the guidelines they’ve posted online. Please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

If you would like to learn more or submit to Antiphony, please visit their website here. 

Bio: Ella Peary is the pen name for an author, editor, creative writing mentor, and submission consultant. Over the past five years, she’s written hundreds of articles for Authors Publish, and she’s also served as a copywriter and copy editor for a wide range of organizations and individuals. She is the author of The Quick Start Guide to Flash Fiction. She occasionally teaches a course on flash fiction. You can contact her at ellapeary@gmail.com.

Our goal with this article, and all of the articles in this series, is to give writers a more realistic idea of what it is actually like to be on the other side of the desk, and what it really takes to make a living (or part of one), in the publishing industry.

We really want to highlight how many people have very different roles on the other side of the desk, and how many of these roles don’t pay enough (or at all).

Often authors can act (or feel like) agents and editors are the enemy, but often they are also writers themselves, and are equally familiar with rejection. I hope this series helps demystify what it is actually like to work in the publishing industry.

If you work in the publishing industry and feel like you are a good potential candidate for a future interview in this series, please send us an email: submit@authorspublish.com.

We are paying all contributors to this series, and the questions will be similar to the ones asked below. These are the questions we think readers most want to hear the answers to. If you have any additional questions you think should be added to the regular rotation please let us know by sending an email to the same address.

For our sixth instalment of the series we are talking to Shannan Mann, a poet and essayist, and the founder of ONLY POEMS, a terrific literary journal that also has a Substack and hosts workshops (among other things). She works full time for Chill Subs.

We are very grateful for her thoughtful answers to these questions.

What is your primary job (in terms of the literary community), and how did you get it?
This is a bit of a funny question for me to answer. I guess technically I am a student. I have been an undergraduate student since, if I’m remembering correctly, 2020. I had to take time off when I was transferring from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand to the University of Toronto in Canada. I also had my baby during this time (she’s now 3!). While I was studying, I periodically worked as a freelancer but was mainly supported by my Canadian Student Loan and some grants. I also earned some small one-off income from various publications and a contest win or two. This Fall, I’ll be starting my MFA at Virginia Tech where I’ll get a stipend. I applied to just one program because my partner, Karan, already studies there. That was the only financially viable way for us to be together. Thankfully, I got in! I also work for Chill Subs full-time (since April)! Benjamin Davis (the co-founder) and I became good friends over the past few months as we emailed back and forth (like essay-length emails) about various things related to the lit world. So, the “hiring process” was very informal. A text over Telegram.

Describe a typical day at work.

I wake up around 5 or 6 AM usually, sans alarm clock. Ever since I gave birth, it’s been very hard to sleep in past that time. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse, I still haven’t decided yet. In any given day,I usually have a mix of to-dos with my school work, Chill Subs work, ONLY POEMS work, and personal writing. Then there’s motherhood – which is triple full-time. There’s also just basic self-care and cooking and cleaning and so on and so forth. I’m grateful that for the most part, I get to work from home. This helps me factor in things like school drop-offs/pick-ups, cooking, appointments around projects, deadlines, and meetings. After getting ready, I try to do a quick yoga session and then work until my daughter wakes up. Then, I get her ready, fed, and drive her to school. Sometimes, if we’re running late, she will join me for the daily Chill Subs stand-up meeting (no, we don’t all stand up). After that, it’s kind of non-stop until pick-up time. When Ana’s gone to bed (usually around 10 PM!), I’ll continue to work until about midnight or 1 AM. I can get by on less sleep so this helps, I think.

What do you spend the bulk of your time doing?

My Chill Subs job is full-time. ONLY POEMS also feels like a full-time job, but thankfully I share this one with Karan Kapoor (the Editor-in-Chief and my partner). My personal writing, right now, is not a full-time thing, but I’m trying to write around 500 words a day. And then there’s school stuff, which fits around all the gaps. With Chill Subs, I spend a lot of time looking over lit mag guidelines, submission opportunities, and anything else indie lit related. Analyzing, compiling, creating, managing. It’s fun – seriously, I’m a total nerd and this is kind of my dream job. Especially because it’s with Chill freakin’ Subs! 

Does this job pay your bills?

Between Chill Subs and the stipend I’ll be getting from VT, yes – we’ll be covered! I also think it’s important to save and invest so I’ve been teaching myself how to figure all that out. It sucks how little financial literacy a lot of us have. Maybe schools should have taught that instead of all those weird math formulas (sorry math-lovers). But yea, during any down-time I watch documentaries about finance, money, and investing. 

What do you think makes you good at your job?

I know the industry very well just through trial and error and time. I’ve been writing and submitting for several years and have a very good sense of how things work and more so, how I wish they would. I want to shake things up as well as create a good balance. I love all that Chill Subs is doing. I also love how we at ONLY POEMS are trying to create something special and lasting in lit mag love. I like taking chances and risks while also continuing to learn, learn, learn. Also, I ask people to tell me, no bullshit, what I can do to get better and contribute more. 

What is a common misconception people seem to have about your work?

Since my “work” isn’t that clearly defined as, say, a professor, or a…regular business person (lol, as you can see, I know very little about that), I’m not quite sure how to answer this. As an editor for a lit mag that gets (gratefully) more and more popular every day, perhaps a misconception that I suspect people might have is about how much or how little time can go into making that happen. The truth is: a whole heck of a lot. It’s constant thought, discussion, tempering, creating, editing, balancing. And just chugging on without much monetary return. As an official Chill Subs staff member now, maybe people think we just Netflix & Chill all day eating Subway sandwiches? Ha…no…no we don’t. 

What is an aspect of your job that might surprise most people?

I’m not sure if this is surprising, whether with ONLY POEMS or Chill Subs. Though it is a lot of work, it’s also very seriously fun. And because there are core principles behind what we’re doing and trying to achieve, it’s also inspiring to work towards that, in a mission-oriented way, I suppose. 

Have you ever considered quitting your job, and why?
Nope! I do hope though someday I can take a vacation, haha. More than money, it’s also just about time and the fact that a lot of work is well, time-sensitive and we’re working towards getting things off the ground, so…can’t really jump ship right now, even if it is just for a fun and brief scuba-diving experience. 

What is the best part of your job?

The people I get to work with and the connections I make while doing so. Hands down, with ONLY POEMS, for example…connecting so many wonderful writers through the interviews we do and then beyond has been truly joyful, especially for a super-introvert like me! With Chill Subs, I’m proud to say I work with some of the best people in the world. 

If you are a writer, how does your work impact your creative writing?

Practically, there’s less time to write. But that would be the case with any job. Ultimately, my particular work – because it constantly puts me in touch with and keeps me up to date on what’s happening in the indie-lit world right now – helps me stay focused and on track with my own personal writing. I read a lot of bad writing daily but also some incredible gems. These inspire like none else (the good and the bad, yes!). I love that my creative and professional life can get along like this! 

I’ll always remember 2023 as the year when the manure hit the rotating blades with regard to AI-generated content.

For the first time, AI chatbots showed that they could produce, on demand, sentences and paragraphs in response to a given prompt. To all appearances, robots were writing articles, verses, narratives—and doing it a lot faster than human authors. Some writers felt genuinely threatened. Was AI about to render human authorship obsolete?

AI can beat humans on quantity of output, but can AI beat an experienced author on quality? Is there any real qualitative difference between material written by humans and content produced by AI apps? AI is speedier; AI is relatively accurate in the basic mechanics of text—spelling, punctuation, grammar. Of course AI will continue to improve in what it can churn out. But is there any realistic prospect of AI “improving” to a point where it becomes indistinguishable from the work of creative writers? Maybe you can imagine it. I can’t. 

The argument continues. As AI-generated content begins to crowd the Internet, many people say they find it hard to spot the difference. I’m surprised by this. As an experienced reader and literary writer, I can sense pretty quickly when I’m reading an AI-generated article, even if it is a short informational piece that doesn’t attempt too much. It has an eerie blandness about it—every statement just a little too obvious, every paragraph following on by word association rather than progression of ideas. Reading it feels like chewing cardboard.

And of course that’s precisely what it is: cardboard. The AI apps are not thinking or composing; they are merely pulping up ever larger volumes of whatever’s already been written, then rolling it out into grey and flavourless prose, uniform in tone and utterly lacking in flair or freshness.

As a living human being with a mind and imagination all your own, you are able to create something no AI can create (and I believe never will). You may have errors in your punctuation and plotholes in your stories, but your work is something individual, organic, original.

On the most basic level, here are some of the things you are doing that no AI can even approach to:

1. Humour. You can set up a disconnect between action and result, or between two characters’ expectations, in a nuanced and relatable way, giving your story a momentary shift from tension to laughter. AI can run through its word banks, sort words by pronunciation and parts of speech, and come up with a pun that has no resonance outside of itself.

2. Dialogue. You can make characters sound like real people, not because you have ingested large volumes of text, but because you are a real person yourself. Your various characters may each have their own vocabulary and speech mannerisms. You can work techniques such as “unreliable narrator”, in which one character’s expression of their partial point of view tells the reader more than any of the characters are aware. Meanwhile, an AI can search its word banks for common idioms or swap out “he will” for “he’ll” in order to follow an instruction to choose more informal language.

3. Rule-breaking. You know when a grammatically irregular construction will work in favour of what you’re trying to achieve—whether it’s humour, sadness or irony. If you’re writing a rhyming poem, you know where to suddenly break the pattern you’ve built up. If you’re writing an opinion-piece, you know how to deconstruct a common cliché in order to underline your point. AI, however, can only work according to rules. If you did program it to break rules in its sentences, the best it could do is to search through a list of common spelling errors and stick one in somewhere. It cannot break the rules with creative intent.

4. Character development. Real people are multi-dimensional in personality—complex, often self-conflicted, with nuanced motives and small cumulative changes of focus. Well-written fictional characters resonate with all of this. Have you ever found, when working on a story, that your characters seem to “take over”, forcing you to rethink your plot to accommodate their emerging interactions? I don’t think an AI entity is ever going to experience the problem of its fictional characters becoming too lifelike.

5. Reasoning. We may not think of ourselves as logical thinkers, but if you’re writing a persuasive essay, you instinctively aim to suit your appeal to your readership. You have a sense of what will be your weightiest argument, and where to position it within your piece. While AI is raking through secondhand material to string keywords into all the most standard assertions on the topic and all the most unexceptional conclusions, you will be giving personal illustrations and reasons for your beliefs.

6. The read-aloud quality. Not every new writer’s sentences flow like a river; not every novice poet’s lines fall trippingly off the tongue. But at least we are aspiring towards effective prose or well-conceived verse. When we read it aloud, we can feel whether we achieve this or not, and we can look for ways to improve. I cannot envision any way that AI could be made aware of the aesthetics of writing: the joy of reading well-written words, the visceral pleasure or displeasure of a syntactical jolt.

7. Freshness. New thoughts, new ideas, new points of view. Quirky takes, flights of fancy, original imagery. You can write things that haven’t been written before, because your mind is more than the sum of information fed into it. Even if you decide to jump off a literary allusion, you’ll find yourself diverting it, subverting its subtexts into something it hasn’t been before. An erasure poem using Robert Frost’s words, repurposed into a 21st-century ecological message, for instance? I’ve tried that (it’s somewhere deep inside someone’s publishing pipeline somewhere). Even using a patchwork of someone else’s words, you cannot help writing something that’s yours and not theirs. You cannot write the same piece someone else is writing, even if you’ve both read all the same books. You are not a robot; you are a unique entity; you have something to say that no-one else has.

This is not an exhaustive list. It’s a brief collection of examples: the things we do that make our writing our own. This is why I am not afraid that AI bots will take my place as a writer.

Bio: Fiona M Jones writes short-form fiction, CNF and poetry. Her published work is linked from her website, https://fionamjones.wordpress.com/.