Considering The Robot Within Since 2010
(image from endgaget.com)
Crashtest is a magazine by and for high school students. If you are currently a student in grades nine through twelve, we want to hear from you. Here are the details:
What: Crashtest publishes poetry, stories and creative non-fiction in the form of personal essays, imaginative investigation, experimental interviews, whatever, but please don’t send us the book report you wrote for English or your Speech and Debate abstract on why (insert trend) is (good or bad) for (insert interest group). In other words, we’re looking for writing that has both a perspective and a personality. We’re looking for writing that has something to say. Our editors are also all writers; we work in many different forms and have many different ideas about what makes writing “good.” As a result, we don’t have a specific kind of writing we’re looking to publish. If you write poetry that rhymes, great!, as long as you do it well. If you write short stories in which characters grow wings and fly around the town’s bell-tower, great!, as long as the story has the guts to pull it off.
Our only request is that you don’t send us work which you found boring or tedious to write. No enforced school assignments, please! If, on the other hand, you wrote something for school, or at home, or out of sheer self-preservation on the most boring family trip in history, and you think it is funny or sad or insightful or unique or in some way INTERESTING then please let us read it.
Our only other request is that you don’t send us fan fiction. We can all watch the same movies and read the same books, but we can’t all get into your head and that’s where we’re interested in being.
Who: Any student grades nine through twelve from any high school in the country (or abroad) can submit to Crashtest, but we’d like to know a little bit about who you are and where you come from. Please include a brief cover letter in the body of your email submission that tells us a little bit about yourself, your name and your grade at the very least. Our reading process is blind, which means all names are removed and our genre editors and readers judge each piece of writing solely on its own merit, but once we decide to publish you, we need to know who you are. So tell us!
How: Crashtest only accepts email submissions. To submit please select three to five poems, one short story or one essay/interview/play/other that you think best represents your work. Attach it to the email as a Word Document (.doc file) or a Rich Text Document (.rtf file.) PLEASE NOTE: writing attached in a weird file format will be discarded unopened. We are paranoid about viruses and would rather be safe than sorry. In the body of the email please include your cover letter where you tell us a little bit about yourself (at the very least your name and your current grade) and in the subject heading let us know which genre you are submitting in by typing: Poetry Submission, or, Fiction Submission, or Essay/Interview/Play/Other Submission as it applies.
Crashtest accepts submissions year round and we try very hard to get back to everyone in a timely fashion. When school is in session, we will generally get back to you within a month of your submission, but in the summer (June through August) this will definitely take longer as we will be slaving away at summer jobs, or at the beach, or holed up in our rooms trying to teach ourselves telekinesis or some other of the myriad things for which the summer provides a handy vacuum. Please give us a little time before you email to ask about your submission, but if it has been more than two months with no word from us, feel free to query by sending an email to our submissions address.
All work submitted to Crashtest must be previously unpublished on the web, or by a national magazine. If you’ve published something in your school literary magazine or in the school newspaper, we’d still like to see it. If you’ve published that work in any other kind of magazine, send us something unpublished to consider. If you’ve put the poem or story up on your blog or wherever, please take it down before you send to us. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but make sure you let us know right away if the work is accepted for publication by another press or magazine. If we go through the whole editorial process to accept you and you dash our hopes by telling us it’s already been published in the Whistling SnortMonkey Review we will be upset and put a black mark next to your name and henceforth and forever after you will be dead to us. You can submit in multiple genres at the same time, but please only send us one collection of poems and one short story or essay at a time. Also, be patient and wait to hear back from us before you submit again.
Got all that?
If the answer is yes: submit at editor@crashtestmag.com.
