Outskirts Literary Journal is accepting submissions for its inaugural Jennifer A. Lurie Memorial Poetry Prize, honoring an artist whose work celebrated curiosity, creativity, and the natural world.
There’s no required theme, but the editors are especially interested in poetry that finds joy, celebrates nature, and brings people together.
Prizes:
First Place: $750
Second Place: $150
Third Place: $50
Deadline: November 14, 2026 Entry Fee: $15 Submit: 1–5 unpublished poems, maximum 10 pages Guest Judge: Natalie Shapero
Winning poems will appear in Outskirts Issue 05 in Spring 2027. All other entries will also be considered for publication.
The Old Scratch Press Collective is accepting submissions for the final 2026 issue ofInstant Noodles, and the deadline is Saturday, November 7!
Our December issue is AUTHOR’S/ARTIST’S CHOICE, which means we’re opening the door to whatever our creative community has been cooking up.
There is no assigned theme this time. We want to see what interests you, what inspires you, what makes you laugh, what keeps you awake at night, or what simply refuses to leave your imagination alone.
We welcome original, unpublished work in a variety of forms, including flash fiction and nonfiction (up to 500 words), poetry, drama, visual art, and multimedia creations.
Instant Noodles is a free online literary magazine curated by members of the Old Scratch Press Collective and sponsored by Current Words Publishing. Our mission is simple: to give emerging and established creators another place to share their work with readers who appreciate interesting writing and art.
We are particularly fond of work that takes chances, offers an unexpected perspective, or leaves us thinking long after we’ve finished reading.
Important dates:
Submissions close: November 7, 2026
Issue publication: December 1, 2026
Submissions are free, and the magazine is free to read. We also nominate outstanding work for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Please submit original, unpublished, polished work. We do not accept AI-generated creative submissions.
Whether you’ve been published dozens of times or are considering your first submission, we’d love to see what you’ve created.
One of the pleasures of blogging for Old Scratch Press is discovering other writers through WordPress. I noticed that poet William Delaat, creator of Primitive Poetry, had been liking some of our posts, so I decided to see what he was writing.
I found a poet with a healthy skepticism toward literary rules and pretension, a fondness for contradiction, and some interesting things to say about writing and sharing poetry. I enjoyed exploring his work enough that I contacted him to ask whether he’d be interested in an interview for OSP.
Happily, he agreed! We talked about literary gatekeeping, writing under a pseudonym, the terror of reading your own poetry aloud, and the challenges of finding a genuine literary community online.
An Interview with William Delaat
Old Scratch Press: On Primitive Poetry, you write about literary gatekeeping and pretension. What do you find pretentious about the poetry world, and what would you like to see change?
William Delaat: To clarify, on that page I have a line that says, “Poetry is pretentious. I love that.”
When I first started writing poetry, I had no literary training (I still really do not). I used it as a way to express myself in my journal in a more creative way. I did this for years before I ever published anything online. I had no concept that there were people who apply rules and logic to poetry. I just wrote what I enjoyed, and that was enough.
In my last year of undergrad, I took a creative writing class. I had taken some writing and English classes before, and part of my degree was in philosophy, so I was accustomed to writing and reading. I had even taken some “creativity” classes that mostly focused on thinking outside the box and (to be honest) marketing. This creative writing class was the first time I was in a formal setting where we were given assignments where I could say whatever I wanted, and in ways I could not throughout the rest of college.
And YET, my poetry was, for the first time, critiqued in ways I had never experienced. Suddenly, I was having to read books about how to write poetry. These books, typically written by successful poets, were far too nitpicky. It put a taste in my mouth that if this were my first time interacting with writing poetry, I would quickly walk away.
It seems silly to put rules and regulations around a form of art that is so fluid. I should note that this experience is from 2018, and I think the more I engage with poetry online, the more I see that other poets agree with the idea that poetry cannot be relegated to just one form. Perhaps these folks who write instructions on how to write poetry should clarify they are teaching how to write poetry like them. I do not care for that.
As for pretentiousness in the poetry world, I think many poets would agree that we write in strange ways. I do wish that many poets would be themselves more than the poets they see successful online. How often do you see people post something along the lines of “In English we say, ‘I love you.’ In poetry we say, ‘my heart sticks to you like the tide does to the shore.'”
Come on. You saw someone else get engagement doing something like that, so you replicated it and passed it off as poetry. It’s not you. I want to read poetry that shows who you are, and how you see the world, even if it is pretentious! I have written many pretentious things, but I truly felt that way in the moment. Be pretentious, but be you.
OSP: You write under a pen name that honors your parents. How does writing as William Delaat affect what you’re comfortable sharing, or how freely you write?
William: I first started writing under a pen name because I was afraid. I grew up in small-town Midwest America. Weekends were usually spent by the bonfire with lots of beer. Traditional values, and traditional views of the world. The pen name made it so I could write without anyone knowing who I was.
I wrote some nasty things when I first started. Things that I’m not proud of. I have deleted three poems from my site because they were too far, yet I feel as if they needed to be written and needed to exist. Writing under a pen name gave me that ability.
While I still write under a pen name, much of what I do now is public. I make spoken-word videos, and I cannot hide anymore. While close friends and family know that I write online, it is still kept quiet. This has changed some of my writing.
Every once in a great while, I write something that makes me think, “Maybe this one is just for me and my wife.” It is very rare, but it does happen.
OSP: You mention that “Academia Is Dead” remains your favorite poem, even though you wrote it in college. What makes that poem particularly important to you? Has your understanding of it changed over time?
William:Academia Is Dead was written in 2018, when I was in that creative writing class mentioned above. Maybe I still like it because it’s moody. Maybe because I am skeptical of higher ed (even though I have a master’s degree).
Although, as I age and fall more into what makes my writing uniquely mine, I think I enjoy storytelling more. Academia Is Dead is a story, after all. It is the visitation of an old friend, begging to be buried alive, but then I suggest she should be publicly executed so all have to stare at what they have done.
It’s a strange contradiction, in a way. I blame technology for what it has done for the classroom, while I wrote it in college, on a laptop. I think people sometimes have a hard time grasping that contradiction, as much as we may hate it, is boiled into our blood. Academia Is Dead is a contradictory piece. I mourn her, yet I suggest a different type of death than what she requests.
I also wrote this in my fifth year of undergrad. Watching freshmen come in and how they complained about having to write four-page papers. Meanwhile, my super-senior friends and I were writing dozens of pages and arguing over who was right.
Maybe it was the angsty music I listened to at that time flowing through. Maybe it was an observation of changes in trends. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have great concerns for college students and the way they now have to navigate AI. I often wonder if they read the poem and see it the way I do.
For those who read it, and are true academics, I hope they don’t view it as a condemnation of them. I hope they can change my perspective on academia.
Featured Poem: Academia Is Dead
William selected Academia Is Dead to accompany this interview because it remains an important piece in his development as a poet and connects directly to several of the subjects we’ve discussed.
OSP: Your website includes both written poems and spoken-word performances. What changes for you when a poem moves from the page to your own voice? Do you find that some poems work better in one form than the other?
William: Writing poems is easy for me. Reading them is terrifying. The camera is not my friend. I’ve always read my poems while writing them, but when it is just me hiding in my attic office, I don’t care. I, like anyone else on the internet, care how they are received.
There certainly are poems that work better when they stay in written form. I have many scrapped videos that I just couldn’t get the rhythm or tone right. I don’t know if this is just a “me” problem or the poem’s problem.
I had a poem a couple of months ago that someone else read and posted to their website. They read it better than I ever could. Again, contradiction. I read aloud every poem I write, but that doesn’t mean every poem I write should be read aloud.
OSP: You write openly about producing work that doesn’t always meet your own standards. How do you decide which poems to share publicly, and what do you do with the ones that don’t make the cut?
William: I suffer greatly from imposter syndrome. At least once a day I wonder why and how I have an audience on my website. I often think that my standard for what is good is far too high, and yet I cannot bring myself to lower it.
The compromise I’ve made is that I just post things. Primitive Poetry is full of poems that have no ending, are missing details, simply because there came a point where I could not go on. My journal is full of even more.
I have over 100 drafts sitting in my WordPress dashboard right now. Eventually, I just get to the point where I panic-post and call it good.
Sometimes I go back and edit already posted poems, even some that were posted years ago. The ones that don’t make the cut live in my drafts or journal, waiting for the day when I visit them and hopefully bring them new life.
OSP: You describe Primitive Poetry as a place to connect with other artists who enjoy writing without taking themselves too seriously. What would you like that community to look like, and what kinds of connections have you made through the site?
William: I owe a lot of my audience to WordPress. The Reader function on WordPress makes it easy to connect with other writers. Dianne, it’s how I found Old Scratch Press.
Unfortunately, I think WordPress is losing touch with the way people interact. Building a community on WordPress is incredibly difficult and takes an immense amount of time. I’ve been doing this for eight years and have 1,500 subscribers. The best way I’ve found to engage with the community is through comments. This is not what I want the community to look like.
I’ve been exploring different avenues: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, even TikTok despite my disgust with it (hey, another contradiction). Substack offers some promise, but it feels like starting over again.
Yet I’ve made incredible connections through WordPress and Primitive Poetry. I met a fellow who reads classic poetry. The way he reads is true art. I’ve met other writers who pour their hearts onto the page. I’ve met people who point out the problems in my poetry and are actually trying to help (now THAT is rare!).
These are all good connections, but they are done through email and the occasional comment. I believe in proximity being an important part of relationships and community. I don’t think Primitive Poetry lends itself to that very well. It is on the forefront of my mind, and I am actively trying to find ways to fix it.
A Final Thought from William
This world we live in is becoming ever more complex and divided. One of the beauties of art is that it shows things how they are and calls it out. We need more art. Whether that be painting, sketching, singing, or writing of any kind, we need it.
Live within the contradiction, point it out, and laugh at it. No one is without contradiction.
If there is anyone who has considered writing poetry but is worried about starting, or confused about where to start, they are welcome to reach out to me through my website. I’ll talk them through what I’ve done that has worked, and things that have failed. Maybe that is how we build the community.
About William Delaat
William Delaat writes poetry with themes of nature, family, grief, and the quiet weight of ordinary life. Through Primitive Poetry, he explores love, loss, contradictory lives, and belonging. He invites readers to slow down and take a closer look to find meaning in the ordinary.
Our thanks to William for sharing his thoughts and work with Old Scratch Press. We hope you’ll spend some time exploring Primitive Poetry and joining the conversation.
Sharing Is Caring!
Getting attention for poetry, books, and independent art isn’t easy. There are so many talented writers and artists out there, and one of the simplest ways we can help one another is by sharing our audiences.
If you’re visiting Old Scratch Press, why not consider featuring one of our members on your own blog, website, podcast, or social media? We’d love to introduce you to our writers and artists, and we’re always interested in opportunities to introduce our readers to new creative voices, too.
Interviews, guest posts, reviews, and featured works are all possibilities. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to cost anything. Sometimes all it takes is a little curiosity and a willingness to share the spotlight.
The more we help one another find readers and audiences, the stronger our creative community becomes.
You’ve written a poem. You’ve revised it, probably more times than you’d care to admit. You’ve submitted it, waited for a response, and, if all went well, received the wonderful news that someone wants to publish it. You announce the publication on social media. Your friends congratulate you. Your mother shares the link. Someone you haven’t spoken to since high school gives it a thumbs-up. And then? Well, you write another poem, of course. And the first one disappears into the enormous pile of things people posted on the internet yesterday.
It doesn’t have to. In the first installment of this series, I talked about finding ways to extend the life of a published poem. In Part 2, I suggested recording yourself reading it aloud, an activity I personally rank somewhere between public speaking and wrestling an octopus. This time, let’s talk about something considerably less frightening: getting several social media posts out of one poem.
Several posts? About the same poem? Won’t people get sick of me? Possibly. If you post the same announcement six times in a row, you may test the patience of even your most devoted friends. But that’s not what I’m suggesting. A poem is more than a link to a literary magazine. It has a history, a subject, a voice, and, if you’re lucky, a line or two that might make someone stop scrolling for a moment. Each of those offers a different way to introduce readers to your work.
Start with the publication announcement.
This is the obvious one, and it’s worth doing properly. Name the magazine or journal, thank the editors, and give people a link to the poem. If the publication has a social media account, tag it. You don’t need to be excessively modest about this. Getting a poem published is an accomplishment, and you’re allowed to be pleased.
Share a line you particularly love.
A few days or a week later, choose a line or two from the poem and make that the focus of a new post. Maybe it’s the line that started the whole thing. Maybe it’s the one you fought with for three weeks before finally getting it right. Or maybe it’s simply a line you’re especially fond of. You could put the words over a photograph, use a simple background, or just type them into a post. Add a sentence about why you chose them, and link to the complete poem. One caution: Check your publication agreement before reproducing excerpts, particularly if the journal has exclusive rights for a period. Linking to the published poem is generally the safest approach.
Tell us where the poem came from.
I love hearing what inspires other writers, partly because the answers can be so wonderfully peculiar. A poem about grief might have started with a broken teacup. A poem about childhood might have begun with the smell of somebody’s basement. A poem about a bird might have absolutely nothing to do with birds. You don’t have to explain what the poem means. Readers should have room to bring their own experiences to your work. But you can tell us what prompted you to write it. Something like, “I wrote this after finding a grocery list in my grandmother’s handwriting. I hadn’t seen her handwriting in twenty years.” That’s a story. It gives readers another reason to be curious about the poem.
Let readers hear it.
If you followed the advice in Part 2 and recorded yourself reading the poem, you’ve already got another post waiting. You can share the video or audio recording with a short introduction. You might even mention something about how the poem sounds different when spoken aloud. And if you haven’t recorded it yet, there’s still time. The octopus can wait.
Ask a question.
Not every post needs to announce something. Suppose your poem concerns a childhood home. You might ask readers whether there’s a place from their childhood they still dream about. If it’s about an object you’ve kept for years, you could ask what ordinary thing they would never throw away. The question should grow naturally out of the poem, rather than feeling like a desperate attempt to generate engagement. You might get a conversation going. You might get three responses, one of which is from your cousin. Either way, you’ve given readers a way to connect with the subject of your work.
And don’t do all of this in one week.
This is important. I’m not suggesting that you turn every poem into a five-day publicity campaign. Space these posts out. Use the ideas that suit the poem and skip the ones that don’t. One poem might lend itself beautifully to a story about its inspiration. Another might have a striking line that’s perfect for sharing. A third might be best experienced aloud. You don’t have to use every suggestion, and you certainly don’t have to post on every platform. If you enjoy Instagram, use Instagram. If you prefer Facebook, use Facebook. If you have a newsletter, that’s another place to share the work.
The point is to give a poem more than one opportunity to find its readers. And remember that not everyone who follows you will see every post. Social media moves quickly, and even people who genuinely want to read your work may miss the original announcement. Sharing something again, in a new and interesting way, isn’t necessarily repeating yourself. It’s giving someone another chance to discover a poem they might love.
Next time: We’ll look at how a poem that’s already been published can find a second life through reprints, anthologies, contests, and other opportunities. Because publication doesn’t have to be the end of a poem’s journey.
And speaking of opportunities: There’s still time to submit to Instant Noodles! Our final issue of 2026 has an open theme, Author’s/Artist’s Choice, and we’re accepting poetry, flash fiction, flash nonfiction, visual art, and multimedia through November 7, 2026. Submissions are free, and the issue will be published December 1.
It’s #LitMagWeek, a celebration of the independent literary magazines that give writers a place to take chances, find readers, and get their work out into the world.
Start with our own Instant Noodles Literary Magazine, sponsored by Current Words Publishing and curated by the Old Scratch Press Collective.
Then go exploring! Check out some of our fellow literary magazines celebrating this week:
The weirdo answer from Dianne (again, me) is Tom Robbins. Not because of what he looked like, but because of what his writing revealed about the strange, funny mind behind it. From there, Dianne (still me) wanders into attraction, humor, imagination, and the peculiar intimacy of reading someone else’s words.
I (Dianne, obviously) encourage you to go read it.
But while we’re (actually me, or rather, I, I am) sending you over there, there’s another reason writers should have Authors Electric on their radar.
Write somewhere that isn’t yours already!
Get off your duff, friends. Authors Electric accepts guest posts, and opportunities like that are worth looking for.
If you’re an author, it’s easy to spend all your blogging energy writing for your own website. That’s useful, but the people visiting your website are generally people who have already found you. A guest post puts your name and your writing somewhere else, in front of someone else’s readers.
And you don’t necessarily need to write about your book. In fact, please don’t turn every guest post into an advertisement for your book. And, on your own blog, don’t do that either. And certainly don’t blog on one blog solely about going to read something on another blog. That’s something we, here at OSP (well, rather I, me, actually; the rest of OSP has no idea what I’m writing here and will probably refuse to be held accountable for it), would never do. (Go read my post!)
Write something funny. Write about the books you love. Write about research that sent you down an unexpected rabbit hole. Write about some peculiar part of the writing life. Write something that makes a reader think, I like this person. What else have they written? People think that about me all the time (I am assured by my caretakers, who wish to keep me relatively compliant and still).
That’s the point.
Guest posting can give you another byline to share, another place for readers to encounter you, another link leading back to your work, and, perhaps most importantly, a chance to introduce yourself without standing on a chair yelling BUY MY BOOK (but seriously, people, buy our books. Well, mine’s not out yet, but buy the other books from OSP. Go ahead. Make a poet smile, and put down the bread knife. God, poets eat a lot of bread!).
glorious poppy seeds
glorious poppy seeds delicious and replete I love your taste so very much I happily pick you
from my teeth
Authors Electric is one place to consider. There are others. Look at blogs and publications connected to your genre, your subject matter, your profession, your interests, or the subjects you research for your books. See whether they accept guest contributions. Read what they publish before you pitch them. (Or just pitch wildly, like me in AA softball in 1970-something; you don’t need to know the date. Shut up about the years gone by! I pitched so wildly they [the coach, my own father] stuck me on second base where I could chomp on a huge wad of Bazooka Joe, blowing bubbles so large they hid my face, and not do too much damage to our losing streak. Wait, what are we discussing here?)
EXCLUSIVE! Actual for real 100% photo of me in little league, wearing my official AA shirt and standing on second base with my beloved glove in my hand, age 9. People never could steal second from me because I was standing on it, and I could not see them coming, because of the gum.
Then come up with something their readers (which is to say readers who read their website/blog) might actually enjoy. Why would they let you post for them? Certainly because you are a serious author taking things seriously and not at all running around the yard barefoot and dangerously late for work. (By the way, forget the job. Poetry is lucrative!)
And how do you know what kinds of posts their gossamer readers like to read? I don’t know. Why you asking me? (Oh, um, read their blog and see what they write about? That might help.)
A quick scan of Authors Electric tells you that its readers are people who like books, writing, writers, publishing, and the odd places a writer’s mind wanders when nobody has stopped it in time. Posts range from writing and publishing to books and reading, author events, technology, literary memories, travel, personal stories, and whatever else can be dragged back, however tenuously, to a life lived among words. They’re personal, conversational, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, and not particularly interested in behaving like somebody’s content-marketing strategy. They seem to be genuinely nice people (as opposed to faking being nice), and that tracks because they’re mostly in Australia and the UK. I cast no stereotypes or aspersions on one side of the pond, the bog, the gulf of unreachable miscommunication, or the other. If you suggest that I am or that I do, or that I should, I will deny it with the vigor of a Dickens character.
They are also intentionally very light on salty words, unlike me and my prose, because I like every damn thing with extra freaking salt.
Why would anyone want a guest post from you? Your mother may have the answer. She thinks you’re great. But also because posting on a regular basis is really quite exhausting, and you can give another author access to another set of readers while giving the blog’s regular writers a bit of a break. Many hands make light work and all that. (Man, I’m tired. I wish someone else would write this and I could just go empty the percolator!)
And if you think you might like to guest post here, absolutely not, you shameless opportunist! Wait… No. I mean, hey, we might like that. Post a response to this post if you’re interested and tell us how to reach out and touch you (in a platonic way, of course).
And if you’d like to see one example of exactly that, go find out why that lunatic Dianne Pearce (moi, bien sûr) had such a deep (and purely, very pure) professional affection for author Robbins that she would, apparently, have overlooked quite a lot, including the possibility of belly-button fungus.
I mean, it’s Tom Robbins we’re (me, I’m) obsessed with, not John Cheever.
Read “Which Author Do You Most Want to Get With?” at Authors Electric. Go ahead. You know you want to (well, actually, you may not want to, but I would certainly like you to, so consider yourself cajoled)!
