Thank you to everyone who shared their work with us. Ache is run by a small team of unpaid volunteers who live with chronic health conditions. We will aim to respond to all submissions within 3 months but unfortunately can’t give feedback on submissions at this time.
Submission period: May 1 - May 15
Acheis excited to announce the opening of submissions for our new anthology Fit Notes: feminist writing on illness and workwhich will explore the intersections of illness, bodies, gender and work, to be published in 2024.
For this book-length anthology, we are open to submissions from women, transgender and non-binary writers. We are accepting submissions of:
Fiction (2,500 words max)
Creative non-fiction (2,500 words max)
Poetry (3 poems max)
We are looking for work that explores the themes of illness and work in varied and interesting ways. We are particularly interested in reading work from writers who identify as working class.
Sickness is an unavoidable part of life, whether we live with chronic health conditions or are knocked by brief bouts of illness. In a society that prioritises our ability to take up and maintain paid work, it is inescapable that our bodies and our illnesses are also intrinsically tied to work. We are measured by our capacity for work, an inability to engage in work-related activities renders us ineffectual as individuals whilst acts of labour outside of this traditional sense of work — the labour of care, domesticity, love, parenthood, craft — are devalued and discarded.
In Fit Notes, we aim to explore work beyond the scope of its traditional and constrictive conceptions and explore how work relates to the body, to illness, and to life.
When we consider this, we might ask: How does work relate to the body? How do we reckon with the devaluing of the unpaid labour of care, domestic activities or parenthood in relation to ourselves? What does it mean to rest? What does work mean to you? Is work making you sick? Are you sick of not being able to work? How do we find value in ourselves when we are told that our worth is measured against our bodies as machines of production and profit? Why is our capacity to work determined by those external to ourselves? Where do we find joy in our craft and our lives outside of the domain of productivity?
We reject constrictive notions of work and are open to receiving writing and art that explores these ideas both within and outside of the traditional conceptions of work, illness and rest. We are not restricted by form and are excited by experimental and versatile pieces of writing that reflect broadly on this theme.
Payment:
Contributors will be paid a flat fee of £60for work published, inclusive of each piece of prose or set of poems.
A note on our fee: Ache is a publishing project run by unpaid editors who live with chronic health conditions. We currently receive no external funding, and every sale goes back into paying writers, artists and printers.
If the fee for Fit Notes isn’t suitable for you, we completely understand and wish you luck placing your writing elsewhere. With every publication, we work towards paying contributors more and in the near future hope to secure funding to increase the fees we can offer writers and artists. Thank you for your understanding.
Submission Guidelines:
Please read all of our guidelines below before submitting to our call-out.
Submission form: send us your work via our Fit Notes Submissions Form between May 1 - 15 2024. NOTE: submissions are now closed.
When uploading your submission file as a Word Doc or PDF (for poetry only) please include your full name, submission type and the title of your piece in the file name: NAME_POETRY_TITLE
We cannot accept submissions that haven’t been sent via this form. But if you have trouble accessing the form please get in touch: helloachemagazine@gmail.com
Please send no more than one piece in this submission window (we will accept up to 3 poems).
Unfortunately, we are not interested in receiving academic essays or heavily referenced texts for this publication. We are interested in prose that explores these themes both in a personal context and more broadly with no limitations on genre or form provided the piece has literary merit.
We accept simultaneous submissions but please let us know as soon as possible if your piece has been accepted elsewhere. We are unable to accept previously published writing.
Take a look at Cusp, our previous anthology, to get an idea of the format of Fit Notes.
Thank you for your interest in Ache’s next publication. We sincerely appreciate your time and we are grateful you have chosen to share your writing with us.
