INFORMATION / MISSION
SECESSION / DETERIORATION
LEGATION

DIAGRAM is an electronic journal of text and art.

As our name indicates, we're interested in representations. In naming. In indicating. In schematics. In the labelling and taxonomy of things. In poems that masquerade as stories; in stories that disguise themselves as indices or obituaries.

Submission guidelines for DIAGRAM are below. Really, submission guidelines are always asinine when they suggest the sort of aesthetic that the editors want. The best way to learn about any magazine is to read it. And conveniently we are (nearly) all online, alone, and free tonight.

But if you want our rambling about what we're looking for, see below.

We sponsor (along with New Michigan Press) a yearly chapbook competition. Submission guidelines for the contest can be found here. All unpublished chapbook submissions are considered for DIAGRAM.

Find our masthead here.

All work on the site is copyright © the original authors. Please do not reprint without permission (though it will be likely given).

Our ISSN is 1543-5784. DIAGRAM is indexed by The American Humanities Index.

Brief statistic about the magazine: we get over a million hits monthly worldwide. Some countries in which we are evidently popular: the USA, the UK, Australia, and Japan. Rock on, readerships!

We describe ourselves as: odd but good.

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SUBMISSION

SUBMIT interesting text, images, and new media.

WE VALUE the insides of things, vivisection, urgency, risk, elegance, flamboyance, work that moves us, language that does something new, or does something old--well. We like iteration and reiteration. Ruins and ghosts. Mechanical, moving parts, balloons, and frenzy. Buzz us.

WE WANT art and writing that demonstrates / interaction; the processes / of things, both inner and outer; how certain functions are accomplished; how things become. How they expire. How they move or churn, or stand.

We'll consider anything you see fit to send us.

PLEASE DO NOT SUBMIT anything titled "13 ways of looking at X" when X is anything at all, because it's like, totally, a variable. You remember the good old days of algebra. Such a great word, algebra. Got a hint of sex and mystery to it. Also adolescent confusion. Anger. Great Balls of Ire. Wait, what were we talking about? Oh. Or know at least that if you submit it we will possibly Be Irritated. And it better be Totally Awesome because it takes a lot of Awesome to trump Irritation. (When that happens—rarely, rarely—it is a great feeling, though.) This proscription is because we get work submitted relatively often that is rocking the blackbird thing, yes, we've read it too, and it can almost never achieve liftoff. Or maybe we just haven't seen any real rockets yet. In which case, go ahead, rocket us. But wait, maybe on second thought, we don't want to get a ton of "13 ways" submissions. Unless they are all Mind Blowing. And make Questionable Use of Initial Capitals. Caveat submittor. Is that Latin? we hope so. Maybe we should Wikipedia it or something.

Anyhow, also: we do not republish work that has been printed elsewhere online or in print (personal websites excepted).

We enjoy traditional forms. We eschew traditional forms. We lie. Send us annotations, schematics, poems, sentence diagrams, definitions. Make us love you.

Book review info is [here]. Books for review to the address on that page, thanks.

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MECHANICS

TO SUBMIT: our great [submissions manager system] allows us to better track and handle submissions. Well, we're using it for everything but REVIEWS, which go to the usual places (below). The bonus of the submissions manager is that you can check the status of your submission at any time online, and that the whole system is easier to use and much more reliable than email.

>>> We much prefer electronic submissions, all things being equal, but we'll be happy to consider hardcopy, too. (Hardcopy submissions can take dramatically longer for us to respond, as our filing system is much less elegant for these submissions; we're still happy to read them, but consider this a caveat.) So use the [submissions manager], and attach a full copy in Rich Text Format, MS Word, or PDF. For images, same deal, send a low-res version (with enough detail that we can read text, but it doesn't have to be print resolution at this point) in JPG, GIF, PNG, or PDF format. If it's something else, please explain.

>>> For sound work, bad news, folks. Our sound section is closed for unsolicited submissions until further notice. We'll probably have another special issue forthcoming, but our whole method for dealing with sound submissions has not gone well.

>>> For reviews, go to the [review guidelines] page.

>>> Questions? Email to [editor--at--thediagram.com].

>>> For hardcopy submissions (if necessary--again, electronic is MUCH preferred):

DIAGRAM
c/o Ander Monson
Dept of English, PO Box 210067
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0067

(Send print/s, slides, zip disks, CDs, magnetic tapes, or punch cards; no floppy disks unless you can get it on an 8" floppy disk, in which case you seriously rock.)

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RIGHTS, ET CETERA

Simultaneous submissions are fine with us as long as we are informed, as long as you let us know immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere, at which point the ethical thing to do is to withdraw it manually in the submissions manager. If you can't do that (the submgr doesn't allow you to withdraw one poem from a 5-poem submission, for instance), email us [editor--at--thediagram.com] to let us know and we'll make a note in the file.

We try to make decisions on all submissions and respond within six weeks; if you haven't heard from us after 2 months, first check with the submissions manager system to see if the response email somehow got spamfiltered on your end. If it says "reading," then we're reading, but feel free to query, to jab us.

We do not consider revisions to submitted work. And it sort of annoys us to have to make revisions on accepted work, too, even though sometimes it improves the works in question. But seriously folks, make sure you're happy with the work when you submit it the first time.

Typically, we acquire first serial rights for work we publish (which means we do not normally consider previously published work). All rights revert to the authors/artists after publication, and the works can then be reprinted (though we ask that we get an acknowledgment as its place of initial publication).

And lastly, we aren't able to pay contributors, as we have no real institutional affiliation/budget (nor do we have an income stream from selling copies). We pay you with props.