Literary Ice Cream Flavours

Business as unusual for the young editors of early harvest. This week we had the great pleasure of scrabbling around the mind of Sam Cooney, editor and publisher of The Lifted Brow, where we found lots of ideas about how to go about the submissions process. A couple of hints about what we like from our submitters:

descriptive languageexcitement and originalityexploring stuff that is unknown…There’s a bit more to it than that when it comes to choosing the pieces that appear in a literary magazine. How do eight minds make ONE decision? Well, Sam said, the best thing to remember is that all of our minds are a different flavour of ice cream. 

'You can’t eat brains', we said. 

'Yes you can!' Sam said.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that as great as a vanilla ice cream brain is, if that’s all you get to use to think with, pretty soon you’re going to be wishing you had a chocolate or a strawberry or a cherry or a maple-walnut-fig brain instead. And for an entire magazine, roughly the equivalent of 15L of ice cream, you really want more than just one brain melted throughout.

Thankfully, there are a variety of brains here at the early harvest editorial table. And so, side-by-side like a tub of Neapolitan, we are ready to accept your submissions as a united ice cream force.

If you would like to submit to early harvest, please send your submissions to info@100storybuilding.org.au, snail-mail (the best kind) to 92 Nicholson St, Footscray VIC 3011, or alternatively drop into a black hole (there are a couple around lately) and hope for the best.

While we are mostly looking for writing from kids, we encourage adults to submit too. Please send a copy of your work, not originals. We won't be able to return original work to you. 

Amarlie Foster is volunteer project coordinator for Early Harvest.

About Early Harvest

Early Harvest is a weekly after school program that brings together children from across Melbourne’s west to create, edit and publish a literary journal. Co-created by 100 Story Building, author and editor Davina Bell and illustrator and creative program coordinator Emma Hewitt in 2011, the program is designed to give young writers and illustrators from diverse backgrounds a platform to share their voice, and to give them confidence in their own creative output. This year we have nine students from Footscray Primary School, Footscray City Primary School and St Johns Primary School. Early Harvest 2014 is funded by donors from The Funding Network and supported by volunteer facilitators Sofia Makin and Shonelle Kent.