We
welcome submissions of short stories, personal narratives of illness,
creative nonfiction, poetry and visual art. Two issues of Ars Medica
are printed per year. The deadline for submission to the Spring issue
is February 28, and July 30 for the Fall issue. Submission by that
date does not ensure review and consideration for the upcoming edition.
Each submission is reviewed by our editorial board. We will try to provide
a response within 6 months of receipt of submission.
Please
see the bottom of this page for some further writing suggestions.
Guidelines
for Submissions:
1. E-mail
submissions are preferred, with Microsoft Word attachments only.
2. Poetry
should be typed single-spaced up to two pages, and prose double-spaced
to a maximum of 3000 words. We recommend sending poetry as an attachment,
to protect formatting.
3. We
will not consider previously published manuscripts or visual art,
and a signed statement that the work is original and unpublished is
required. Copyright remains with the artist or author.
4. Payment
will consist of copies of the issue in which the accepted work appears.
5. Please
indicate word count on your manuscript and provide full contact information:
name, address, phone number, fax, e-mail address.
6.Please
submit manuscripts to arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
On
Writing For Ars Medica (suggestions):
We are
often asked about which qualities we look for when we select a piece
for publication in Ars Medica. Members of our Editorial Board and
our
Advisory Board come from diverse healthcare and literary backgrounds,
and
the short answer is , "We know good writing when we see it."
Those of us
who do clinical work and encounter narratives of illness everyday
have come
to identify what feels honest, fleshed out, embodied. We have become
demanding readers to the extent that familiar stories of diagnosis
and
treatment have to bring something new and particular to the telling
and to
our experience. All of the usual rules of storytelling (and writing
workshops ) still apply: Create characters we care about and let them
speak
through dialogue. Show us their world through almost cinematic detail,
don't just tell us it exists. Build dramatic tension within a structure
of a
beginning, a middle and an end. If you're writing non-fiction, let
yourself
enter the piece so we know why you were moved to write about it. Keep
up
the pacing so we want to know what happens. Leave us feeling something,
be it confused, uncomfortable, enlightened, curious or wanting more.
Work on
your voice as a writer. Readers, like patients, want to be in good
hands
and to remember what was told and how.
Endings
don't have to be happy or tidy. As Board Member Rebecca Garden says:
I look for work that defies expectations and conventions, whether
formally or in terms of content. We all shoulder the burden of conventional
narratives and tropes of illness and medicine. The work we publish
should
communicate in surprising and arresting ways and break through the
dominant
narratives of illness (e.g. courageous battles ending in triumph or
uplift)."
James
Wood., in his book, " How Fiction Works," describes something
he
calls "thisness" -the sense that a detail or quality is
so intrinsic to the
thing it describes, that we can't imagine it otherwise.
Some
of us also like to become disoriented , "defamiliarized,"
to turn a
conventional description on its head. (The images we publish can do
this
too. Some of you will remember Jane Martin's cover of a bouquet of
roses
juxtaposed against her husband's fresh post-op cranial scar. Beautiful
and
unexpected).
We primarily
receive submissions from writers about being a patient (or
their family member) or about being a professional (a doctor, nurse
or
healthcare worker).
In the
former, we sometimes encounter unprocessed details which have
specific, charged meaning for the teller but which are unclear to
the
reader. These pieces in many ways resemble journaling or therapeutic
writing. The author is too close to the events or uses personal code
and
short-hand which leave gaps. As a result, we are not fully invited
into the
experience. Stories of trauma and loss are often fragmented, because
they
remain so for the writer and have not yet been crafted through the
personal
and creative steps which render them coherent and universal.
Writing
personal narratives may indeed be healing, but to be literary,
there needs to be distance, an "observer's eye" which allows
us to see the
full picture.
In the
latter category-stories by healthcare professionals-we often see too
much detachment. Diagnostic efficiency cuts to the chase ,abbreviates
or
over-simplifies the story and fills it with jargon, acronyms and even
cliché.These narratives are journalistic or more like a rushed
case
presentation . The subjective is edited out and the reader may know
what to
think, but not what to feel.
Sometimes,
we get the sense that a story has been misappropriated, that the author
-clinician has not obtained permission to tell it from the client
or patient who lived it or else the author has not fully moved the
piece
from fact to fiction. Our position is that re-telling something shared
in
confidence in a defined therapeutic context is unethical unless the
patient's co-construction is fully acknowledged or else the narrative
has
moved well beyond the personal and particular.
In contrast,
some of the most compelling pieces we receive are written by
doctors or nurses who have become patients themselves. Suddenly the
world
they know so well has to be re-explained and re-examined, as if encountered
for the first time. Everything is suddenly new. And terrifying.
Each
issue of ARS MEDICA embodies many of these ingredients in its stories
and poems of birth, illness, ageing and the death of loved ones. We
are
introduced to doctors, nurses and other clinicians who either care
too
little, too much or struggle with finding the right balance with each
patient. We meet patients trying to find their way as they navigate
illnesses and forge new identities.
We encourage
authors to read a sample copy of the journal before they
submit works and to refer to our submission guidelines on this webpage
.
Individual copies of Ars Medica can be ordered from:
lkonigshaus@mtsinai.on.ca;
To subscribe, please go to www.utpjournals.com.
