About Vulgata... Vulgata is an on-line market, and we don't pay by the word, so you can make your story as long as it needs to be. However, writers beware: often excessive length is the result of padding or unfocused story-telling. Before you send us your beloved 20 000 word juggernaut, make sure that you couldn't say the same thing in 5000. What we are looking for is writing that really communicates. We want to see the beautiful pictures that appear in your head. We want to get inside the feelings and joys and disappointments of your characters. Art is a tremendous gift that allows us to penetrate the barriers of subjectivism: don't waste it on imitative schlock. Show us something that is yours, not something that is just like the summer's best blockbusters -- but with a twist... Our mission is to support the creation of art, and the renewal of culture. Since this can be accomplished in any genre, we are willing to consider any genre: classic romance, Greek tragedy, phantasmagorical allegory. Anything. That is, anything except what usually passes for "Christian fiction." If your work could believably be placed in a Chicken Soup for the Soul collection, or turned into a teledrama for the local family-friendly television station, we don't want it. That said, we are a Catholic magazine. So no moral gut-rot. You don't have to be Catholic to write for us. You don't have to be Christian. Your story can be dark as hell. But its moral and metaphysical underpinnings must not be evil. Same thing with sex: include it, if it's appropriate, but use it to "tell the truth about the human person," not to titillate and arouse.

Poetry Guidelines

We are looking for poetry that evokes the mysterious, the beautiful, the haunted, the sorrowful, the wonderful.

Poetry is a means of exploring the intimate relationships between form and content. A poem that is in the form of raw inspiration dropped out onto a page with line breaks is a very good beginning, but it like an uncut diamond: it is not yet a poem. The process of crafting this raw material into a work is difficult. The inspiration must be carefully cropped and pruned, without killing it. Bad poetry errs in three ways: it is uninspired, it is inspired but not crafted, or it is inspired, and then wrought to death. The great thing to avoid is writing a "poem" that is really just normal prose that has been centered in the middle column of a page; but which has no meter, metaphor, enriched adjectives, etc.

The details

Submit by email, to slushpile@vulgatamagazine.org. In honour of my father-in-law and web-consultant, we prefer non-Microsoft file formats. RTF is good, ODT is better, or just stick the text into the body of your e-mail. I don't care how you format it. I'll be reading on screen, so you needn't bother with standard manuscript format. Just make sure it's in a straight-forward font that won't confuse my computer.

We accept poetry of any length, including epic. Depending on length and merit we pay between 20 and 50 Canadian dollars, upon publication and ask for the right to archive your poem.


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Non-Fiction Guidelines

Vulgata is looking for high-quality articles that address issues of interest in Catholic apologetics and culture. Our highest criterion is originality: send us your new ideas, things that you are unsure about, that you think, “Oh, well, that's a realy good idea but nobody would be willing to publish it.” One caveat: the work has to stay within the realm of orthodox Catholicism. If it's some really cutting edge, new thought about why it really would be a good idea to ordain gay sea-lions, you'll have to send it somewhere else. If it's a tentative theology of ghosts, working from the appearances that they make in scripture, combined with various things that appear in the Church Fathers, the writings of C. S. Lewis, and the Romantic Poets, then we're probably interested.

Query first. A good query should tell us what your idea is, what your primary sources are going to be for research, an approximate word count, and what qualifications you have. The latter should not be neglected – and the qualifications don't need to be academic, nor do they need to be professional writing credits – but it should also not be overdone. If you've been published in seventy-three different academic journals, and you've taught at fifteen different Universities, and you have degrees in everything from advanced astro-physics to metaphysical fly-fishing, only list the most relevant things. “I've been published in dozens of publications including...” and then list the top three. No more than three lines of print should be spilled on this.

Stating your idea, on the other hand, should be given more care. Give a one paragraph outline, clearly stating your thesis, giving an idea of how you intend to argue your position, and letting us know why you find this idea exciting. In general, try to show, not tell, us that you have something interesting to say about your subject matter.

Queries should also let us know whether this is an article that already exists, and if not, how long you think it will take you to write it. Please keep in mind that acceptance of a query doesn't necessarily translate into acceptance of the finished work.

Read some of our articles to get an idea of what sort of thing we're interested in. Keep in mind that while we are not opposed to articles on abortion, divorce, contraception, homosexuality, etc. these are topics that have been done to death in the Catholic press, and that have already been covered extensively in Vulgata. If you have something ground-breaking to say about them, send it along. Otherwise, try to send us something that people aren't talking about, but that you think they should be.

Submit queries to slushpile@vulgatamagazine.org