Join our lovely contributors!
Currently, submissions are closed.
Check back as new issues are announced!
Past Calls for Submission
Volume 1, Issue 1: Life in a Pod
Open from: 16 January – 27 February, 2026
We’re gathering original mini-works that explore what it means to be held, transformed. Think milkweed pods and oyster shells: life inside a pod or shell is intimate, microcosmic, ever-shifting. This volume asks – what happens in that small, protected space? What happens when you’re shucked or blooming?
We welcome writing on queer ecologies, coastal cosmologies, and ideas of transformation and seasonality, all within the confines of your perceived pod, that is: what holds you, what you exist within. We encourage the convergence of coastal + terrestrial: tidepools meet prairies, saltwater meets sap. Send in whatever shape your pod takes.
We’re seeking submissions at an intimate scale: poems, micro-essays, vignettes, hybrid forms; drawings, mini-prints, tiny illustrations, surreal visual experiments. Writing must not exceed 500 words, and handwritten submissions are encouraged. Art submissions must be mini – small enough to feel like they could live inside a pod.
Volume 1, Issue 1.5: PEARL!
Open from: 17 June – 30 June, 2026
Pearls – conceptually – symbolize resistance, resilience, and transformation. Mollusks such as oysters choose, instead of violence, to envelop the unknown in layers upon layers of nacre, transforming what might be considered an intruder into a precious part of themselves. This special mini-edition, PEARL!, explores identity, change, belonging, becoming, protection, and the possibility of seeing the unknown in kin.
PEARL! will be randomly placed in first edition copies of Milkweed & Oysters Volume 1, staying true to the presence of pearls in the ocean: rare and serendipitous.
You are invited to submit to PEARL!: please keep submissions pearl-sized (100 words max, or 4×4″). Besides that, feel free to explore the concept in whatever way you see fit.
Milkweed & Oysters strives…
to highlight Queer ecological art, writing, prose, poetry, and other forms of creative and quirky communication. Queerness is beautiful and deeply intertwined with the ecological world through memories, moments, notes, stories, sex, and study!
We love and support…
all forms of queerness: queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, gender-expansive: you name it, we love it! We promote stories of intersectionality that show queerness through different genders, ethnicities, races, religions, abilities, ages, upbringings, socioeconomic statuses!… +++ biodiversity!