Issue 11 at the halfway point

Because I haven't been accepting a lot of submissions lately, Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 11 is behind schedule and it'll cover six months rather than the usual three. However, all submissions are still receiving responses within one month. Alexandra Seidel's poem Twists, Turns; Lost Things has just been posted.

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 10

Issue 10 began (if you read from top to bottom) or ended (if you read from earliest to latest) with the essay Entrapism. For this issue I received 24 submissions, and I accepted three stories (one of which was flash length) as well as one poem.

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 9

I've decided to clear out the blogspam and go back to using this page for slush updates.

The introduction for issue 9 was A Labyrinth In Retrospect. For this issue I accepted 5 stories and poems out of 30 submissions. A standout work was the English translation of Death in This Garden Like a Pilot in His Ship, by Jacques Barbéri (tr. Michael Shreve).

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 8

And another issue is up! In this double issue covering the last half of 2009, we have the stories My Own Private Earth, by Lawrence R. Dagstine, Fear In the Land Without Shadows, by Christopher Schmitz, Experimental Archaeology, by Bogi Takács, and Teen Success, by Jason Corner, plus the poem Infrasubstructure, by Diane Boisvert and my review of The Maze Runner. There's also another poem posted, Marginalia to Stone Bird, by Rose Lemberg, but through the alchemy of Labyrinth Inhabitant that one is considered to be part of issue 9 instead of issue 8.

The 5 accepted works for issue eight were selected out of the 34 (by a rough count) submissions during the latter half of the year. I got a lot of poems this time around. Although I do seem to accept at least one poem every issue, I think stories will always play the more central role in Labyrinth Inhabitant. It's really hard to work your way into the "mysterious artificial environment" theme in the space of a poem, especially because it typically requires building up an actual mystery. There aren't many poems in the mystery genre, that I know of. I also accept maze-structured poems that aren't set in an actual labyrinth, but those are kind of a sideshow to the main theme of the site. (But still, isn't "Marginalia to Stone Bird" amazing?)