My fellow academics, here is just what you need at this conclusion of an extremely challenging academic year: an opportunity to turn your attention to something that you do for pleasure, namely writing fiction. Having just recently been notified that I had a short story accepted somewhere, I have been eager to share that news, and also to circulate a reminder about the open call for AcademFic. The journal accepts submissions from academics in fields other than creative writing, i.e. academics who write for pleasure and/or to explore ideas related to our fields through story. AcademFic launched last year, and is published by PALNI Press. It is first and foremost an online open access periodical, but a print edition is made available each year for those who wish to purchase a copy.
Here is the call for submissions from the website, for your convenience. We look forward to reading your story!
When academics write fiction, it is sometimes too long or short, too philosophical, or just doesn’t find a home in a literary journal or magazine, where the many professionals in the field of creative writing are already jostling to publish. The journal AcademFic provides a home for fiction of any length from flash fiction through to novelette that is written by an academic. Academic is defined for this purpose as someone with a PhD and/or who works as an educator and/or researcher in higher education. This includes not only university and college lecturers and professors but also academic librarians, archaeologists, museum curators, editors at academic presses, graduate students, and anyone pursuing what has sometimes been categorized as an “Alt-Ac” career. The aim is not to exclude others, but to carve out a space for the many academics who write fiction despite it not being part of their professional duties, who often struggle to find an appropriate place to publish their stories despite their being worthy of being read by a wide audience. While some of the fiction published here may be not only by academics but clearly written with them as the intended audience in mind, most of it is intended for a general readership. Like all fiction, some of it may be of more interest to some readers than others: historical fiction, alternative history, science fiction, romance, horror, and everything else you can imagine may be submitted, apart from fan fiction set in a universe or franchise created by someone else and which is under copyright.
We encourage authors to write under their real name, especially those who have tenure. However, given that some academics may worry that writing fiction is not valued and appreciated by their employers, and may even have already published fiction under a pseudonym for this reason, we are open to publishing works with attributions that do not reveal the author’s identity to anyone other than the journal editor.
Interested in submitting to this journal? We recommend that you review the About the Journal page for the journal’s section policies, as well as the Author Guidelines. Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting or, if already registered, can simply log in and begin the five-step process. Be sure to provide enough information about yourself to indicate that you are an academic (broadly defined) in a field other than creative writing.
Copyright to works published in AcademFic is retained by the author(s) who grant AcademFic the right to publish their submitted work online as well as in print annuals and anthologies. Articles published in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Authors are free to engage in non-commercial distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are also free to republish any work elsewhere, provided it is accompanied by an acknowledgment that what they wrote first appeared in AcademFic.
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