MOXY IS CLOSED TO SUBMISSIONS

Moxy is currently closed to submissions. We hope you enjoy reading about the magazine below and browsing the pieces on our website.

Submissions Guidelines

Moxy is a literary magazine which focusses on creative nonfiction. We are looking for criticism, essays, travel writing, and personal essays, as well as original artwork and cartoons. Please read our submissions guidelines below for information on how to submit.

We will publish and support your work no matter your creed, race, sexual orientation or gender identity. We think a diverse array of voices makes for a better magazine, and we want to publish as wide a range of writers as possible.

So what is creative nonfiction? Read the segment on this question below or browse the pieces on our website to get a feel for the genre. 

  • We’re looking for pieces of up to 4,000 words. 

  • Please send submissions as an editable document, preferably a Word doc, and include the word ‘submission’ in the subject line of your email. 

  • We’re open to proposals as well as finished articles. We are looking to get a clear idea of the overall themes, tone, and structure of your piece. The more detail you include, the easier it is for us to say yes! You can submit proposals using the below form.

  • We do not accept pieces that have been published elsewhere. The only exception to this is if your piece has been published in a print issue that is not available online. 

  • You may submit multiple pieces and/or proposals, but please ensure each is sent in a separate email.

  • We accept simultaneous submissions. We just ask that you let us know immediately if the piece is accepted for publication elsewhere. 

  • Every piece will be assessed by our team of editors, and we’ll aim to get back to you within 8 weeks. Writers who are successful will work with an editor at Moxy to shape up their piece for publication on our website. 

What is creative nonfiction?

Moxy is a creative nonfiction magazine. What exactly do we mean by this? The term itself is a bit of a fudge, vague enough to absorb any nonfiction deemed ‘literary’ enough by cultural gatekeepers. Our understanding of it, and hence the kind of work we’re looking for, can be defined more narrowly: every piece should have a nonfiction basis, while foregrounding stylistic techniques as well as the precise attention to detail usually associated with fiction writers. To show you what we mean, let’s take a look at a few concrete examples across different subgenres. 

TRAVEL WRITING

The Snow in Ghana by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński opens in a Ghanese village, as the author is quizzed on his mother-country by the locals. We love how, unlike run-of-the-mill travel journalism, this piece does not begin with a generalisation along the lines of ‘Ghana is a land of contrasts,’ or a cursory sketch of the political situation, but like a novel or short story, opens in medias res, with the action underway and the reader trusted to work out who is who. It uses a simple touristic conversation, which takes place during a break for repairs, to illustrate much wider political realities about the colonisation of Ghana and, implicitly, of Poland. The article relies on the strength of drama, rather than abstract analysis, which we think is essential for any creative nonfiction piece discussing political, economic, or historical concepts.

MEMOIR

We have chosen Geoff Dyer’s essay Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with particular reference to Doughnut Plant doughnuts) because it stands out from so many memoirs in its humourousness. The idea of using an obsession with finding the perfect doughnut and coffee as a way to hint at larger ideas, ideas of home, foreignness, habit, of being stuck in a rut and getting out of it, is brilliant. Not only is it full of fantastic jokes, observations and encounters, but its long Thomas-Bernhard-influenced sentences actually embody its main themes: repetition, going out of one’s way for ultimately trivial purposes, circling back to the same destination. Rather than focusing on obviously serious or important moments of your life, we urge writers to think like novelists or poets, and use small moments typically overlooked to gesture at larger themes.

ESSAY

Andrea Long Chu’s On Liking Women synthesizes memoir, theory, close-reading, and thorough historical and cultural analysis to produce an essay that puts the personal and the global into dialogue, challenging accepted conclusions about the nature of desire and progressive feminist tenets. Though Chu is part of an academic tradition, her prose is personal, incisive, and frequently stunning – never unwieldy or weighted down by jargon. We think this essay is exceptional in the way that it steers the reader through Chu’s own complicated history with gender and sexuality without becoming purely confessional and self-indulgent. Perhaps most importantly, the essay never delivers an easy way out to the tensions it probes. It is clear that Chu is still grappling with questions about her own identity, and that her own reading (and re-reading) has informed her personal development. We’d like to see such criticism that is provocative, genre-bending, and above all else creative.

ART CRITICISM

Like Chu’s essay, Zadie Smith’s Getting In and Out synthesizes several genres. It is at once a review of the film Get Out, a critique of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, a discussion of the author’s own racial identity, and a reflection on depictions of racialized violence more generally. We admire Smith’s agility in moving between these forms, and between the different registers they each demand. She fluidly includes other thinkers such as James Baldwin without seeming stilted or overly academic. She continually questions her own assumptions and point of view, an openness uniquely accommodated by the essay form, and which we’d love to see in our submissions. 

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As you can see, there’s a huge range of styles and subject matters across (and within) just these four articles. Further examples of pieces we’ve enjoyed include: Altered States by Oliver Sacks, Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston by Jia Tolentino, Cult of the Literary Sad Woman by Leslie Jamison, Pyongyang’s Missing Millions by Andrew Lowry, A Place in the Country by WG Sebald, and Take a Photo Here by Teju Cole. 

We’d love to see a similar range and encourage you to send us pieces that are unusual and that you can’t imagine fitting easily into the boxes of other publications. Successful pieces are likely to show what the four above have in common: a style tailored to the subject matter, a focus on unexpected details, and a distinctive point of view. 

Thank you for reading our submissions guidelines and we hope to hear from you soon!

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