HAL publishes visual art, poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, long form essays, reviews, video, film, and sound.
We publish work of the highest quality so send us your best. We genuinely want to read your submission if it is right for us.
What’s right for us? Everything, but
remember, HAL:
- has a dis/ability focus and is affiliated with Ontario D/deaf/HoH, Disabled, Mad, Sick and Neuroatypical Poetics Collective, a collective that resists ableism and supports disabled artists.
- stands with those acting to end systemic racism.
- recognizes and supports the history, creativity, and courage of sexually diverse communities.
- is made by artist labourers and supports workers’ rights.
- advocates for Climate Action.
Subscriptions to Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine are free. Submissions from subscribers have a better chance of being more closely read by an Editor.
Please take time to read and view the work of writers and artists in our free online magazine so you have an idea of our scope and interests. Read HAL’s Mandate.
Most content originates from invitation and referral. Unsolicited submissions make up a small percentage of what we publish, but don’t let that deter you. If you are genuinely interested in the work we’re doing and feel there is a good fit, we’re probably going to be genuinely interested in you.
Proposals are considered on an ongoing basis. Word limit is open, with length being appropriate to the piece. Email submissions only please.
General Submissions should be sent to HAL@HALmagazine.com
HA&L is cooperatively published by a small collective of artists and writers, so it may take several weeks before you receive a response to your submission.
Contributors receive a small honorarium determined by the level of funding attained during the period of publication.
•OUR READING PERIOD FOR 2024 IS NOW CLOSED. WE WISH YOU WELL WITH YOUR WRITING & ART-MAKING
Issue seventeen.1 / Spring 2024
SUBMISSIONS CLOSED
CONTESTED HISTORIES
Deadline: February 1, 2024
Email: to HALcontestedhistories@gmail.com
Guest Editor: Kathryn Waring
“The way we tell stories has real consequences on the way we interpret meaning in our everyday lives.”-Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World
“[Stories] remind us about who we are and where we’re going, on our own and in relation to those with whom we share this world. They remind us about the relationships that make a good life possible. In short, they matter.” -Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter
Contested Histories: What happens when you and another person remember a shared experience differently? How do you react when a government, community, or loved one keeps something in the past a secret or else actively tries to erase it? How do we grapple with the fallout, discover the truth, and navigate our way forward? And how do these contested histories change the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves?
We seek fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and art of all styles which interrogate our understandings of history, memory, and identity. Surprise us.
Issue sixteen.2 / Fall 2023
SUBMISSIONS CLOSED
The Black Mundane is Radical
Deadline: August 3, 2023
Email: to issue16.2submissions@gmail.com
Guest editor: Ashley Marshall
Black artists and thinkers to the front. Our “Mundane is Radical”-themed issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters will include poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, hybrid forms, fabulism, and artwork that is preoccupied with themes of queer ecologies, biomimicry, fables, flânerie and its remixes, critical geography, afro-bubble gum, astroprojection, urbanism, guerilla gardening, city design, access/ability, food apartheid, autopoiesis and its metaphors, humanisms, and QTBIPOC inside or outside “natural” spaces. We seek work that incorporates ideas, language, characters, main or sub- themes, images, and artwork related to speculative fiction, n/Nature, architecture, freedom, and much more. Send it and we will look at it. Please send by August 3 to
issue16.2submissions@gmail.com
Editor/Curator’s Note: Storytelling, from science fiction and fantasy, to fables and folklore, has informed our thinking about nature and the built environment. This issue turns to the arts to foreground and forecast what is next for nature, food justice, water preservation, climate action, and afro-/Indigenous futurisms.
David Harvey says, “In the history of economic crises, and through the deployment of the spatial fix, there is a persistent tension between capital that is invested in the built environment for longer periods of time — ‘fixed capital’ — and the competitive drive towards ever greater expansion and mobility that renders existing infrastructure obsolete … capitalism is always on the look out for another ‘fix’.” (Mobility, Crisis, Utopia – An Interview with David Harvey
There is a plan for us, but with enough imagination, we can think, dream, and organize ourselves into alternative modes of being, eating, gathering, growing, designing, and building. How do we exist in ways that are sustainable, reproduceable, and affirming? How do we write racialized and queer characters whose futurity is realistic and humanity is futuristic? What imaginative labour can give us tools toward freedom? How can leisurely activities restore us, playlists energize us, cookbooks gather us, walking alert us, and being bored or exhausted to death be resisted?
— Guest editor Ashley Marshall
Issue sixteen.1 / Release: Spring 2023
SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED
Issue Title: THE WORLD IS MY COUNTRY
Guest Editor, Kim Echlin
Engaging with language and culture, this issue imagines the idea of an ‘international’ reader. While presenting unique perspectives, it intends to create, and bring together, an audience from many cultural origins.
Issue fifteen.2 / Release: Fall 2022
SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED
Issue Title: PROCESS
Guest Editor: Karl Jirgens
Focus on the idea of process including a range of visual approaches to the processes of time, erosion, memory, and dreams. This issue of HAL features multiple literary responses to process, including translations, linguistic restraints, re-iterations, repetitions, recollections, depictions of human relationships, manifestos, linguistic evolutions and revolutions, plus developments of literary expression that include reconfigurations of conventions such as the alphabet itself.
Issue fifteen.1 / Spring 2022
SUBMISSIONS: NOW CLOSED
The Poetry Chapbook
Email: halchapbook@gmail.com
Guest Editors: Shane Neilson and Jim Johnstone
The poetry chapbook strain of the English-language small press tradition in Canada is strong. We think it might be stronger than ever based on the proliferation of small presses across Canada, but also because hybrid and online-only presses offer forms of writing to anyone in the world, bypassing material distribution chains. Since we have participated in this economy for over twenty years now, happily watching the rise of presses devoted to amplifying marginalized voices as well as giving a generation of poets their start in chapbooks, we wondered if it was time to create a kind of creative time capsule for poetry chapbook presses in Canada. Rather than impose a thematic container for the issue, even at the level of pre-fabricating a title for the issue, we have decided to see what themes emerge from submissions. We are interested in anything concerning the genre of poetry and:
- memoirs by chapbook press proprietors/creative teams that discuss the books published, the experiences had, the people that were cared for and loved (you know, the life)
- essays by collectors with an interest in particular runs
- articles about the chapbook world by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers
- reviews of Canadian chapbooks from any time in history
- interviews with chapbook press proprietors/creative teams (query first as there is a limited number of these that we can run)
- articles on digital editions or digital-only chapbooks
- the impending professionalization of the chapbook world
Please write halchapbook@gmail.com with submissions that engage with the list above or, if you’ve an idea that’s outside those bounds, please share it with us. We’d love to consider it. All submissions should be unpublished. We are comfortable with simultaneous submissions.
Finally, if you don’t think you can submit to the issue, perhaps you can encourage someone else to submit. We’d love for our chapbook capsule to be as inclusive as possible. We don’t know what we don’t know; and there is so much life in chapbooks in Canada, so much that is new; so much that isn’t new but which deserves celebration.
In addition to its regular digital run, issue 15.1 may be published in print by Frog Hollow Press. This is still to be determined. Contributors to the digital issue will be given a small honorarium. If the issue is also published in print, then contributors will be given a copy of the print book as payment.
Jim Johnstone is a senior editor at Palimpsest Press, where he curates the Anstruther Books imprint.
Shane Neilson is an associate editor of HA&L. His bio can be found here.
Issue fourteen.2 / Fall 2021
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
Working Title: Science
Email: halscienceissue@gmail.com
Guest Editor: Sima Rabinowitz
Science is among the most creative of human endeavours. From ancient depictions of scientists and scientific phenomena to contemporary graphic novel formats, from Frankenstein to recent best-selling novels dealing with such themes as pharmacology and climate change, and from memoirs on scientific discovery to essays on “life in the lab,” the people and ideas of science continue to capture our imaginations. Our science themed issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters will include poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, hybrid forms, and artwork on STEM themes (Science, Medicine, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) broadly defined.
We seek work that incorporates ideas, language, characters, main or sub-themes, images, and artwork related to STEM expansively imagined and rendered. Artwork may include a broad range of formats and images across the issue’s themes, including drawing, painting, illustration, appropriate medical imagery (for example, “brain art”), photographs, collage, among other forms.
STEM themes may be drawn from, but will not be limited to, a multitude of diverse disciplines in the natural and physical sciences, medicine, mathematics and statistics, computer science and informatics, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, and any branch of engineering. Submissions may incorporate, but are not limited to, themes and/or language related to theory, experimentation, practical application, STEM-related work, the stories of people engaged in STEM subjects or activity, STEM-related objects, instrumentation, and methods, or experimental/inventive exploration of scientific language, concepts, and images. We welcome work from writers, artists, and “sciartists” in all genres, as well as from members of the scientific community.
Co-produced or collaborative work is welcomed and encouraged. The issue will include diverse styles, approaches, themes, and forms, and, we hope, contributions from across North America and around the world. We will consider work in translation, provided the original and the translation are both provided and available for publication.
A small honorarium is offered for online publication with rights returning to creators upon launch of the magazine in the Fall of 2021.
Submissions close November 15, 2020. Notification of acceptance by February 15, 2021.
Send submissions or queries to halscienceissue@gmail.com
Issue fourteen.1 / Release Spring 2021
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
Issue Title: THE HAMMER
In this issue HA&L returns to its beginnings with a focus on Hamilton.
Issue thirteen.2 / Release: Fall 2020
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
Issue Title: No Longer Still in the Land:
Canadian Mennonites and Affiliates
A Mennonite led issue with Guest Editor Grace Kehler including personal essays, short stories, interviews with Mennonite-Metis artists, and more!
Issue thirteen.1 / Release: Spring 2020
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
Issue Title: The World Out There
In this special issue Guest Editors Matthew Zantingh and Alec Follett focus on The Environment and The Arts.
Issue twelve.2 / Release: Fall 2019
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
Email: DisabilitypoeticsHAL@gmail.com
Issue Title: Imaginary Safe House
HA&L Canadian Disability Poetics Issue
As Canadian poetry publications have increasingly incorporated social justice mandates into their publishing programs, many magazines have published special issues devoted to the work of different identity constellations. In what is not intended to be a comprehensive list, special issues have been devoted to the work of Indigenous writers (Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, the Malahat Review), the work of queer writers (Poetry is Dead, CV2, Malahat Review, Room of One’s Own), poetry concerning issues of class (Poetry is Dead), and poetry by racialized writers (Room of One’s Own). Even the relatively thornier subject of religion received a thinking-through in Canadian Notes and Queries. The objectives behind such initiatives is to represent the members, works, plights, and successes of various complex communities to an increasingly diverse readership.
Noticeably absent in the list above are issues focusing on poets living with disability/disabled poets. Both Poetry is Dead and Matrix Magazine published strong special issues focusing on mental illness, but notwithstanding these two important efforts, the more complex lived experience of disability has not had a platform in Canadian literature. When it comes to the accommodation and encouragement of persons with disability to participate in creative, care, and occupational spaces, Canadian publishing has demonstrated a significant lag behind other Western nations.
Disability activism in the arts has a long history in the United States, in part resulting in the publication of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, a landmark anthology from Cinco Puntos press in 2011 that has functioned as a rallying flag for poets in that country. Following on the (w)heels of its success, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked: The Fiction of Disability was released in 2017 by Cinco Puntos. Other nations have proceeded to fill in their own gaps: Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back appeared in the UK from Nine Arches Press in 2017; that same year, Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain from University of Western Australia Press appeared. All of these books do important work and have been well received. By no means do we intend to narrow the field of disability poetics to this linear narrative, for several other anthologies have appeared in several other countries. (Please see the Disability Literature Consortium for a more extensive list: https://dislitconsortium.wordpress.com). Yet for a nation like Canada, the traditional comparisons with the UK and Commonwealth are fair enough.
It is our sincere hope that the Hamilton Arts & Letters issue devoted to disability poetics will serve as a substrate and locus of energy for the eventual publication of a Canadian anthology on disability poetics that we intend to make inevitable. To that end, we invite all poets who self-identify as living with a disability or as disabled to submit up to 5 poems to DisabilitypoeticsHAL@gmail.com.
We are not interested in defining disability to others for the purposes of submission to this issue (we want to hear about your self-conceptions) but we will point out that we are interested in materials that concern both the so-called traditional “invisible” and “visible” disability categories. We are especially interested in submissions from queer and BIPOC poets who identify as living with disability or as disabled.
In addition to poetry submissions, we also are very interested in:
- Reviews of books (either of poets with disability or reviews written by poets living with disability) up to 2000 words
- Prose memoirs of significance by poets who live with disability up to 3000 words
- Scholarly articles on Canadian disability poetics and Canadian poets who live with disability that aim for 5000 words
- Non-print (sound; performance) renditions of poetry & visual poetry
Please send all document files in .doc format before April 30, 2019.
As with issue 11.2 (the “New Brunswick Poetry Issue”) there will be some kind of print version of the Canadian Disability Poetics issue printed for purchase by Frog Hollow Press. Not all articles accepted for online publication can be included in the print version. A small honorarium is offered for online publication and a copy of the print volume in which a contributor’s submitted work appears in will be provided to the contributor.
It is our hope that the poems, prose, and performances within the “Canadian Disability Poetics” issue bring forth crip consciousness in new and unexpected ways. Audio voicing of the text-based works in the issue will be made available online. We are looking into other ways to make the issue as accessible as possible.
Please query us if you have any questions: DisabilitypoeticsHAL@gmail.com
Issue twelve.1
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
Issue Title: Re:Creation Stories
An Indigenous led issue. Guest Editor: Johannah Bird (Anishinaabe Euro-Canadian and a member of Peguis First Nation in Treaty 1 territory). Query HA&L with your art, poetry, prose, and creative non-fiction.
Issue eleven.3
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
Email: newbrunswickpoetryissue@gmail.com
Call For Papers: The New Brunswick Poetry Issue
In New Brunswick at the Crossroads (WLUP 2017), Tony Tremblay calls New Brunswick the “least studied” of the Canadian provinces. Pause for a moment: this means that New Brunswick is the junior partner of the Maritime region, a region whose competition for neglect under the literary nationalist project are, arguably, the prairie provinces and the North. Hamilton Arts & Letters wishes to offer a redressal of sorts with Issue 11.3, the forthcoming New Brunswick Poetry issue, in which Guest Editors Sue Sinclair and Shane Neilson curate a kaleidoscope of critical perspectives upon the English-language poetry of the province. We are looking for:
- historical essays
- nonfiction essays
- scholarly articles
- interviews
about the English poets and poetries of New Brunswick. Questions we are interested in include: What does “being a Maritimer” mean? What does it mean to be a New Brunswicker or a poet from New Brunswick? What is the Maritime diaspora? Is there a national preference towards art and artists from other places of greater perceived literary power, or not? What is or should be the canon of New Brunswick poetry? We are also very interested in reading prose pieces about racialized, queer, and disabled authors by and about poets from New Brunswick. We are also interested in printing
- a healthy collection of reviews about books by English poets who hail from the province.
Though we welcome contributions by New Brunswickers for this issue, we are particularly interested in prose by non-New Brunswickers because such inter-cultural work can create useful correspondences between art and artists. We hope that this perspective will recontextualize the poetry of the region in surprising ways. In addition to the prose complement of the New Brunswick Poetry issue, the editors will consider
- unsolicited poems
for inclusion in the issue. Please query newbrunswickpoetryissue@gmail.com about the prospect of contributing prose along the lines described above. In your query, please clearly state how your proposed piece connects with a poet of/from/in the province.
Please send no more than 5 poems totalling no more than 10 pages to newbrunswickpoetryissue@gmail.com AS A SINGLE .doc ATTACHMENT. Poems sent in the wrong format, or embedded in an email, or as a series of separate attachments WILL NOT BE READ. In a cover letter, please state what your connection is to the province. You need not be a current resident.
Any queries or poems received after June 1st cannot be processed.
Issue eleven.2
SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED
10th ANNIVERSARY EXTRA!
Edited by Paul Lisson and Fiona Kinsella
FEATURING: Jeffery Donaldson • Bruce Elder • Kenneth Rexroth • BW Powe • Joseph Amar • Karen Barr • Susan McCaslin • Leonard Cohen • Alise de Bie • Roy Adams • JS Porter • John Robert Colombo • Simon Orpana • M. Teresa Santalucia • Richard Murphy • Yuan Hongri-Manu Mangattu • Ellen S Jaffe • PQL Audio Interviews • AND HA&L RAVE with Darrell Doxtdator • Jim Chambers • Miriam Clavir • Charles Criminisi •
Issue eleven.1 / Release: Spring 2018
THREE PASSIONS
Guest Editor, Rick Stapleton. Guest Poetry Editor, Chris Pannell.
Peace and War. Love and Revolution. This issue celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the arrival of the Bertrand Russell archives in Hamilton. We invite you to submit to this special issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine. Show us what you’ve got!
Issue ten.2 / Release: Fall 2017
CANADA? 150: STORIED LIVES
Guest Editor, Melissa Tanti. Guest Poetry Editor, Canisia Lubrin.
The writings collected in this issue consider community-engaged work as necessary though oftentimes problematically framed. Community-engagement has been taken up as one of a series of recent buzzwords being used to justify, design, and fund education, corporate responsibility, and governmental programs. Tanti explores the words we use, what they mean and convey, what they enable and enact, to what ends they are applied and what possibilities or limitations they create.
Canisia Lubrin curates a dynamic and powerful selection of poetry that locates where we are now.
Issue ten.1 / Release: Spring 2017
ASYLUM
Guest Editors: Shane Neilson and Monica Kidd. Guest Poetry Editor: Klara du Plessis.
Hamilton Arts and Letters magazine has been publishing themed issues for over eight years. So far, the magazine has not devoted an issue to matters of health and medicine – until now. We invite you to submit to ASYLUM, a special issue of the magazine under the co-editorship of Dr. Monica Kidd and Dr. Shane Neilson.
Physicians and ill persons need new metaphors, symbols, and affects with which to interpret illness, otherwise the clinical discipline of medicine might strip away meaning from life and leave the body only with pathology to understand what is happening to the body and soul. Poets and authors tend to offer empathy and understanding as cure, a remedy equal to the evidence-based medicine physicians profess faith in. In the words of James Hunter Wood, Baton Rouge surgeon and Master of English literature, “… the hegemony of information [is] tantamount to the loss of story.” Story — language, metaphors, symbols — “is the displacement of diagnosis with experience. It asks not ‘What is it?’ but ‘What does it mean?’” Though patients and medical practitioners need diagnoses, neither group need not look solely to medicine for understanding of the human condition. After all, we all are born and we all die. Much art comes from the fact and shared circumstance of our mortality. Everyone has brushed up against illness, so we want everyone to feel welcome to submit – from future and current physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and pharmacists to patients and their loved ones. In particular, Hamilton Arts and Letters is open to the work of young writers.
We seek poems, reviews of poetry collections (2000 words or less), essays (4000 words or less), and visual art that concern:
- personal illness, physical and/or mental
- illness in the family
- physicians, nurses, hospitals, allied health care providers, health care students
- treatment, be that pharmacology, homeopathy, surgery, or psychotherapy
- posthumanistic interventions (ie. nanotechnology)
- medical technology
- palliation and end-of-life issues
- recovery from illness
- the representation of illness in popular culture
- the illnesses of poets and illness as they manifests in the work of Canadian poets
Drs. Kidd and Neilson are established poets with several books published. Dr. Neilson is long-time editor of Frog Hollow Press, where he handles many manuscripts in the course of a year in both prose and poetry genres; Dr. Kidd has served on arts juries for organizations ranging from city and regional arts institutions to the Canada Council.
Issue nine.2 / Release: Fall 2016
PLAY
Guest Editor: David Forsee.
Guest Poetry Editor: Annick McAskill.
It’s your turn.
Consider playfulness {games}, what’s in play {culture/politics}, the play’s the thing {theatre}.
Issue nine.1 / Release: Spring 2016
PLANET EARTH
Labour? The Environment? Earth Works? Cultural Heritage? Our Solar System? Travel? Sci-fi? Art of Poetry? Art of Life? Art of Death? The Bees’ Knees? Guest Poetry Editor, Shane Neilson.
Issue eight.2 / Release: Fall 2015
ill met by moonlight
Guest Editor Shane Neilson delivers poetry with a punch, while Jeffery Donaldson reviews Shane’s Manifesto of Fervourism. John Terpstra sheds light on the dark waters of Chedoke. Archivists, curators, and critics assemble an encompassing history of The (Young) Contemporaries: a group of artists representative of the ideal of collective art-making. All this and more!
Issue eight.1 / Release: Spring 2015
The Educated Imagination
Guest Editor, Joseph Adamson.
Northrop Frye (1912-1991) is arguably the most important intellectual Canada has produced and one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century. Frye authored of over 35 books, including The Modern Century and The Educated Imagination. In Issue eight.1 contributors respond directly to Frye’s work or use this framework as a spring-board to present the unexpected.
HA&L magazine 
One thought on “Submit to HA&L”
Comments are closed.