INSTANT NOODLES LIT MAG is seeking contributors for our upcoming issue, Al Dente — and we want your work
If you’re an indie writer, poet, or artist, join us Saturday, June 13, at 5 PM Eastern (2 PM Pacific) for a free online workshop to spark your creative energies and learn where to send completed submissions.
Hosted by Robert Fleming of Old Scratch Press, Instant Noodles Lit Mag, and the Rehoboth Beach Wrier’s Guild.
Seats are free, and limited. Three lucky participants will win a signed copied of an Old Scratch Press book!
Don’t forget to visit! Voted one of the “Best Online Literary Magazines of 2024”, miniMAG lets OSP loose on Issue 198
Intense. Short. Weekly.
That’s how miniMAG describes itself. A short, intense, and weekly literary magazine specializing in short-form poetry, flash fiction, and flash non-fiction that you can rely on to offer a giddy mix of unpredictability and variety.
Voted one of the Best Online Literary Magazines of 2024, with each issue miniMAG serves up a potent deployment of text and image, a real seed bomb of words and color. A welcome arrival in my inbox for some time now, I loved the concept right from the start.
There’s something for all tastes in miniMAG, whether it’s punchy, wacky short stories or surrealist poems, intriguing essays or wild flights of fancy, graphic art or pictures drawn with big, thick crayons, delicate line art or great booming splashes of color… miniMAG has it all, set into a slick template that remains reassuringly the same: black pages, white type.
When Alex, miniMAG’s editor, agreed to let Old Scratch Press produce an issue, I was stoked. And it was great fun seeing it all come together. At 30 pages, it’s a little longer than usual, but hopefully just as intense.
And just as multifaceted, seeing as all ten OSP members contributed work:
Robert Fleming supplies much of the art (some of it ICE-themed), including two visual poems. OSP’s newest member, Beatriz Fernandez, contributes two poems and a photo. That most Neapolitan of Californians, Alan Bern, presents two photo-poems, while Virginia Watts provides two poems and a flash-fiction piece titled “War”. Dianne Pearce gives us a taste of what to look forward to from her upcoming poetry collection, “In The Cancer Cafeteria”, with a poem, a short story, and two collages. Gabby Gilliam is also here with a piece called “Reawakening”, while R. David Fulcher turns things spooky with “The Weird of the Water”. Nadja Maril supplies three poems and a photo of the most Napoleonic rooster you’re ever likely to see, while Morgan Golladay brings things to a thoughtful close with her poem “Sky Cast”. As for me, I’ve got two illustrated poems and a piece of flash fiction in there, and a couple of illustrations thrown in to boot.
For a collective work by a short-form collective, I really can’t think of a better vehicle than miniMAG. To read it, visit miniMAG and subscribe, or stop by miniMAG Press While you’re at it, recommend it to some of your friends, or all your friends! And also come visit the OSP members’ Subs too! And if you have a Substack yourself, let us know so we can drop by.
So, a special thank you to Alex at miniMAG for letting us take on Issue 198. It was a real pleasure, and I hope you’ll have us back in the not-so-distant future!
Yes, poetry collections win Pulitzer Prizes too. The 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry has been awarded to Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems. Howe is known for her observations of everyday life. She explores themes of contemporary womanhood, personal loss, human miracles, sorrow and joy. There are 111 poems in the winning collection. Howe’s direct and honest voice is her trademark. She’s a poet of our time who should not be missed. Some of her most well-known poems involve the loss of her brother in 1989 who died of AIDS-related illnesses. This is what drew me personally to her work many years ago, because I lost a brother about the same time in the same way. Here is one of her poems about this terrible sadness.
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.
I thought it might be fun to revisit the winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. That poet’s name was Edwin Arlington Robinson, and he won the prize two more times after being the first winner. He was known for his narrative skill and psychological depth. Here is what is considered by many to be his most famous poem. It seems a long time ago when he was writing poetry, yet when you read this poem in particular, it seems that he could be writing this poem today. This is because all poetry is about one very complicated subject: humanity.
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany,CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was short listed for 2024 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her.
Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:
Jonah is my first volume of poetry, so it was especially gratifying to look at the list of Category Finalists posted to the Hoffer Award website and see it there in all its glory. Just as parents can instantly spot their own kids in a crowded park full of other children not objectively dissimilar to their own in any real way, my eyes were instantly drawn to that familiar sequence of words: Jonah’s Map of the Whale. Next, of course, I checked my name—you know, just in case there was another Jonah’s Map of the Whale by some not-Anthony—, and then, certified that it was indeed my Jonah, I smiled at the sight of three little words that have come to mean a lot to me: Old Scratch Press.
I am in the process of completing my second volume of poetry, so “Jonah” seems at times like a distant country I once used to live in and hope to return to someday. So I went back to a review poet and critic Billie Mills so kindly wrote about it when it came out last year, just to see it through someone else’s eyes before writing anything about it. The book consists of three sections, each devoted to a different “persona”, which Mills described as “nearer to archetypes than individuals, carrying something of a mythical nature […] narratives, fables, romances, but never anecdotes.” It’s a good description, but that does not mean the book is non- (or im-)personal, because that narrative, mythical, fable-like quality is perhaps the most any of us can aspire to in our best (and worst) moments.
I have a thing about threes, perhaps because three was the last number I can say I ever managed to understand. I get three. I can feel three. Anything from four to the Googolplexian, and I’ll just have to take your word for it. But threes work; threes make sense. So this book, naturally, has three sections.
The first of these is a group of poems about a fictional character named Flounder, sometimes presented as a young man with mental health and addiction issues, other times as a flatfish on the floor of the Irish Sea. So when he’s not a floundering human, he’s a very human flounder, and what tips him one way or the other is how deep he sinks into his overactive, intrusive unconscious self.
The second character, Blundra, is everything Flounder is not. The world likes Blundra, and Blundra knows how to make it give her what she wants. The problem is, what she really, really wants is something this world cannot give. Constantly on the verge of an epiphany that never quite comes, she experiences a frustration that is also a sort of longing. This revelation-in-the-making whispers to her from afar in the form of her dead grandmother’s voice.
The third section of the book, the title poem, is a turn-of-the-21st-century rereading of the Jonah story, and it shares an origin with my speculative novel Hibernaculum (2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Science Fiction Category Finalist).
Jonah and Hibernaculum are kindred works, as they were both initially parts of a literary triptych called Three Jonahs. The third panel was the as-yet-unpublished Jestor.
I scrapped the triptych idea when Hibernaculum and Jestor turned into full-length, standalone novels, and “Jonah’s Map of the Whale” found a new home alongside “Blundra” and “Flounder”.
Although the triptych was disbanded in practice, it remains very much together in spirit. There is a Jonah and a whale in each of these works. Jonahs fleeing their own private Ninevehs, whales catching them halfway between one Joppa and another Tarshish. The whale can be a person or entity (Jestor), a process (human hibernation), or it can even be oneself and one’s past, as in “Jonah’s Map of the Whale”.
Personally and collectively, we’re constantly fleeing and being dragged back. It’s part of the cycle of existence. The Jonah tale is pure dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis…repeat), and so is history, so is an individual life.
So what sort of cartography is this “map”? In the book, it’s a two-track reverse chronology: the misadventures of Alex Iden Grey, on one hand, and the turn of the 21st century, on the other. Wrong turns, missed opportunities, and ignored warnings, all seen in retrospect and laid out as cautionary tales. And what is a cautionary tale if not a map in negative, a map that says “the guy who went this way got swallowed by a whale.”
A simple map, really… in hindsight.
That’s what the book is about. It took a long time to write (dewrite, rewrite, repeat…) and now it is what it is, no take-backs, no changes.
Born in Dublin and raised in Wicklow Town, Anthony Doyle holds a joint honours degree in English and Philosophy and a master’s degree in Philosophy from University College Dublin, Ireland.
He moved to São Paulo, Brazil, in 1999, where he works as a translator from Portuguese to English.
He writes poetry and fiction for adults, teens and children.
If you’ve never had a writing mentor, you may not realize you need one. If you’ve had a mentor, you probably know what an impact they’ve had on your writing.
A mentor’s role can be complex, encompassing the roles of teacher, editor, advisor, parent, friend, coach, cheerleader, critic, judge, proofreader, and sounding board.
As such, they are an invaluable resource at any stage of your career, but especially so at the beginning, whatever your age.
Many poets go it alone at first, but almost no one significantly improves alone. A good mentor shortens the time and distance between where you are and where you want your writing to be. They help you see the habits you repeat without noticing, the strengths you underestimate, and the opportunities you’d never spot on your own.
In a field where progress can feel slow and uneven, the guiding hand of a mentor gives you structure, accountability, and a clearer path forward. If you want your work to grow better with intention—not just luck—mentorship is one of the most effective tools you can invest in.
If you are lucky enough to find a mentor at the right stage in your writing life, then you will be ahead of the game in more ways than one.
Reasons You Need a Mentor
This article by Shane Manier makes a great case, among many other excellent points, for hiring a mentor as a time and money-saving move.
Many writers naturally gravitate toward MFA programs hoping to find that kind of mentorship; sometimes the magic happens and an inspirational teacher becomes a long-time mentor:
Dr. Cody Smith found one in her MFA professor Jonathan Johnson.
“I remember thinking, This is what it means to be a teacher. Jonathan was a teacher who, instead of teaching you the material, taught you how to love the material.”
But realistically, given the elusive and indefinable chemistry that is involved in the mentor/mentee relationship, and the time constraints, there aren’t enough Creative Writing professors to go around and they have so many students throughout the years, that it can’t always work out.
For those of you outside creative writing programs, there are other places you can search for mentors. In my case, I went searching for mine online. I began looking for the websites of poets whose work I had read and admired. Some of them offered workshops or classes. I found that one poet whose poetry I had never forgotten over the years, Andrea Hollander, offered one-on-one tutorials, so I contacted her.
That fortunate decision led to a years-long series of phone tutorials (no Zoom back then!) with Andrea, who became a friend and mentor as well. We have kept in touch over the years; we share our writing news and she continues to support my work and alert me to publishing opportunities. Even after all these years, every time I write, I hear her voice in my head, guiding me, much as you would remember what a parent would say or advise in certain situations.
You might prefer to meet with your mentor in person, in which case you should attend local poetry events to search for one, as this author did successfully:
“At a poetry open-mic event, I connected and found one of my mentors, having witnessed his performance and interaction with fellow poets and event organisers.”
”The AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program is open to all AWP members who identify as emerging writers, but they particularly encourage applications from those writers who have never been associated with an MFA program, and those writing from regions, backgrounds, and cultures that are too often underrepresented in the literary world.”
”The Latinx in Publishing Writers Mentorship Program offers the opportunity for unpublished and unagented writers who identify as Latinx (mentees) to strengthen their craft, gain knowledge about the traditional publishing industry, and expand their professional connections through work with experienced Latinx authors (mentors).”
“A five-session workshop on the vocabulary of poetics · Taught by Tamarah Rockwood
The heart of the workshop is the mentorship. Starting in Session 2, every participant submits one poem per session for individual written feedback from me, returned by email before the next class. Across the series, that produces forty-eight feedback letters, one for every poem from every poet in the room. This is not a lecture you are buying. It is a writing relationship.”
Some of you may fear to be too heavily influenced by a more experienced poet’s style in a mentor/mentee relationship and this discussion from New Writing North addresses that issue:
“I’ve heard people speak of mentors with concern. The usual fear is usually one of influence – that the mentor’s style and interests will rub off too heavily on their work. Personally, I see it as a dialogue. The chance to speak directly to a writer you admire about poetry in general, and about your poems specifically.”
Pay It Forward
In the end, we all can hope that the advantages outweigh these concerns and the difficulties we have to overcome to find a poetry mentor. In my case, I know I would not be where I am without my mentor’s timely guidance. She gave me confidence to find my own voice and style and helped me learn to distinguish between a promising poem and one that needed more work. She pushed me to challenge my abilities and try poetic forms I had not attempted before. She inspired me to submit my work more widely and to dare to aspire to more discerning markets. But most of all, she taught me how to be a good mentor in my turn. I have tried, in my small way, to emulate her and to encourage budding poets that I have met and give them confidence to send their work out into the world.
Everyone needs encouragement and poets especially operate in a very obscure and underrated field that is not always well received or understood by the general public.
As poet Chloe Yelena Miller says in a Savvy Verse & Witinterview by Serena Agosto-Cox, “May we all find the mentors we need at the right time”!
AL DENTE In cooking, pasta or risotto al dente (/ælˈdɛnteɪ/, Italian: [al ˈdɛnte]; lit. ’to the tooth’) is cooked to be firm to the bite, requiring a brief cooking time. The term also extends to firmly-cooked vegetables. In contemporary Italian cooking, it is considered to be the ideal consistency for pasta.
What does al dente mean to you? To your neighborhood vampire it probably means something different. How about to the prospector mining gold?
Send us something that you haven’t overcooked!
Submissions close on July 5, 2026; the issue publishes SEPTEMBER 1, 2026.
READ ONE OF OUR MEMBERS’ LATEST POETRY COLLECTION:
Wouldn’t I just be lucky enough to get Mother’s Day as my regularly scheduled blog post day. *sigh* I’m not a fan, in general, of prescribed celebration days like this one. However one of the first things my husband and I bonded over was Mother’s Day. We stood in a Ralphs together, a few weeks before the event, looking at cards:
“Mom, you were always there for me.” “Not so much.” “Mom your hugs are the warmest.” “Um, well….” And so on, until we smiled ruefully at each other, looking for the most non-sappy card, and laughing at our shared predicament.
Yes, it’s Mother’s Day, but we also have to be honest that not all mothers are the mother we need. Some are not kind or safe. Some are just cold, like hugging an ironing board instead of a loving mother, or absent, or not interested. In those cases, we learn something important. We mother ourselves. We learn to speak gently where others were harsh. We learn to protect what is still tender. We learn to become the steady presence we once needed. And, even those marginal mothers… I feel like we have to allow that not everyone who becomes a mother wanted to be a mother, and so it seems almost natural that some are not going to be good at it. Until all mothers become mothers solely by choice, there’s something demanded of, and taken from, women that also negates their personhood. So, Mother’s Day is a mixed bag at best, in my opinion and experience.
Mother’s Day does force us to think about our mothers, which I guess is the point, but let’s think beyond our biological mothers to all the ways mothers and mothering show up in our lives. Mothering does not belong to one shape, one role, or one person. We mother children. We mother pets who rely on us for warmth, routine, and the quiet comfort of being known. We mother friends when they are exhausted and cannot hold themselves up for a while. We mother partners, siblings, parents, and sometimes even strangers, offering care that asks for nothing back. Sometimes dads do the mothering better, and men can mother as well as women.
We also mother our homes, our gardens, our work. We tend to them. We notice what is growing and what is struggling. We prune what no longer serves, and we stay present long enough for things to take root.
Mothering is not only about giving birth. It is about giving attention. It is about noticing life and choosing to care for it, again and again, in all its forms.
As authors, we mother each other too. We nurture stories before they are ready to stand on their own. We encourage drafts that are still learning how to breathe. We remind each other to keep going when doubt gets loud. I have been especially grateful for Virginia Watts (who I also think of affectionately as “Dead Wood”because she has a remarkable gift for cutting away everything unnecessary from my writing). There is something deeply maternal in that kind of care. She has helped me shape my forthcoming book, and I am forever grateful because her mothering gave me courage to keep writing.
And, on Mother’s Day, I am always especially grateful for my daughter. I didn’t birth her, but I mother the heck out of her, and she often allows it and even tolerates it pleasantly, for which I am forever full of gratitude. I love being a mother, and I love mothering. It is one of my main joys in life, and on this day I send so much love to my pets, and my wonderful daughter, without whom I would not a mother be.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the variety of mothers, and to those grieving mothers or mother’s love, a hug and a wish for peace for you.
Mother’s Day also means forcing your family to do what you want to do. We’re gonna go eat dim sum now. LOL Sticky rice!
Whenever I’ve written something I feel really conveys what I was striving for, I want to share it. But often, it sits on the computer for a while. Until published, the words are out there but they are not being read. Enter the world of literary magazines, a wonderful opportunity to share not just your own work but to be part of a larger community.
In 2020, publishers Dianne Pearce and David Yurkovich launched Instant Noodles Literary Magazine. Six years later it is still going strong. As their business and projects have expanded, so has the Instant Noodles Literary Magazine team. While Dianne makes the final decisions, she has some help. Members of The Old Scratch Press short form and poetry collective serve on a rotational basis as Contributing Editors. We have a voice in choosing the themes and selecting work.
As a writer and poet who frequently expresses herself through the medium of (CNF) Creative Non Fiction, these are the submissions I’m most often reading. I read each piece submitted to Instant Noodles several times. I’m interested to discover how the writing responds to our theme. Most of the fiction and poetry I write is inspired by true life events. I am awed by writers who successfully blend reality, imagery and memorable characters into story. Not every submission sits squarely within one genre. Some straddle the line between reality and fantasy, between poetry and prose. We can’t offer payment, but we can bestow praise.
This issue, I’d like to gush about a certain piece I really liked. A piece I’d like the world to read and think about. It was submitted as CNF. In many ways it comes across to me as poetry. As with any short piece of work, every word counts. As a reader, that’s what I’m reading for, power in each word.
The 2026 issue May theme just released, is titled Planes Boats Cars Trains. When I suggested the theme, I envisioned all the ways transportation impacts our lives and how many exciting stories take place when a character is moving from one place to another. I wasn’t thinking about animals or freedom, but that is the beauty of words. We all perceive our world in different ways. A good artist can share their vision.
The piece is called, “From Cage to Street” and is written by Tamara-Lee Brereton-Karabetsos. It begins in the first sentence to take the reader to the Serengeti plains of East Africa where a line of trucks are transporting wild animals. You’ll have to use your imagination to decide whether these animals are zebras, tigers, gazelle or something else. What you do know is they have fur and ears that twitch.
“Engines hum. Metal shakes. Paperwork counts weight, not panic.
Inside, bodies shift where they can, small movements, breaths caught between bars.”
She contrasts the business of checking locks and papers with the vibrations of the shaking vehicle. The writer contrasts herself with the animals. She is walking free and unencumbered, Each selected image— a swing, running dog, a kite— echoes the contrast.
“The wind brushes my face, a dog darts past, a child’s kite catches the sun.
Each step is choice. Each breath is mine. Each glance is unbound.”
Her poem/essay shifts back to the unloading of the crates and in her telling she slows down time for me as she expresses the melancholy of the caged versus the free.
“Animals shift from one container to another. The journey continues, but choice is absent.
Instinct carries memory of plains, but the body moves through something imposed, not chosen.”
This piece creates a sense of place and communicates the author’s appreciation of the physical agency of walking and choosing your own destination. I am pleased we were able to publish it and I urge you to take the time to read it along with many of the other fine pieces in this issue.
Thank you Tamara and thank you writers for making ours such a strong community. The next theme currently being read is Al Dente. Think pasta cooked just so, not too soft and not too stiff. Do you have a piece of writing that meets that criteria? What does Al Dente mean to you?
Remember that Instant Noodles Literary Magazine believes in helping fellow writers by nominating their work for prizes. Please send us your best work.
Thank you for reading and please follow us here and on Facebook.
Nadja Maril is an award winning writer and poet who has been published in dozens of online and print literary journals and anthologies including: Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, Invisible City Literary Review, Instant Noodles and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is the author of Recipes From My Garden, published by Old Scratch Press (September 2024), a Midwest Review California Book Watch Reviewer’s Choice. An Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at USM.
This year’s National poetry month began with the successful liftoff of NASA’s Orion spacecraft as part of the Artemis mission, a forward step in manned spaceflight to the Moon—so it’s a perfect month to open a discussion about the future of Speculative poetry!
Speculative poetry is having a moment…
Speculative poetry, or SpecPo as it is also known, is coming into its own, especially in the last few years. Long overshadowed by science fiction literature, speculative poetry has finally been accepted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) as valid publications to become a member and even has its own Nebula Award category as of 2025, with perhaps a permanent Hugo award category in the works as well.
But with the addition of the Nebula and possibly Hugo awards, the momentum for speculative poetry is increasing.
What is Speculative poetry?
Speculative poetry generally refers to a poem with hard science-fiction or high fantasy elements, the latter which can include horror, mythology, fairy tales, folklore, so you can argue that it has been around forever. But it has evolved over time to be more futuristic and diverse in nature, a situation which I think will continue to gather speed as we race for the Moon and Mars via future space missions.
The SFPA’s founder addresses some of the difficulties in defining Speculative poetry in this essay:
Like many writers interested in science fiction, I started out writing poetry and then attempted to write science fiction short stories, never pausing to consider speculative poetry as a natural next step instead. When my sallies into short science fiction failed to match my vision, I began to explore poetry more deeply, especially narrative poetry, but again, never considered speculative poetry specifically. The truth is, I was not encountering much speculative poetry in my reading. In the science fiction magazines I read, poems seemed to appear as filler while the stories and novellas were the main attractions. The pieces tended to be very short and from a limited number of authors. This was my perception at the time, though I’m sure it was not unique. There were and have been many magazines publishing speculative poetry all along, but they did not come across my radar as a fledgling writer.
After many years of writing and publishing poetry, I began to explore short fiction again. I wrote an opening scene for what I first envisioned as a story, but it just didn’t materialize further. I was excited about the scene, though, and the vision would not leave me. Finally, the light bulb came on and I realized that this scene would work just as well, maybe better, as a poem! That reworked scene became a poem that was later accepted by Star*Line.
Speculative Poetry from Past to Present
To read some poems from speculative poetry’s past, peruse Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre a list curated by Theodora Goss, a professional fantasy writer, poet, and Victorian literature scholar who teaches Fantasy literature.
There’s a lot of excitement surrounding Speculative Poetry and in my research I ran across several articles that express that:
What you can do to support Speculative poetry right now
Join the Speculative poetry initiative to make the Hugo Award for Poetry a permanent category. It is a process that takes two years and must be ratified by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) (TheHugoAwards.org) who administer the award.
Submit your work and read magazines that publish speculative poetry:
The SFPA publishes a market list of paying and non-paying speculative poetry magazines.
The future of Speculative poetry looks bright–it is a form exceptionally adaptable to our changing world and open to the increasingly diverse visions of reality and the future of humankind. It’s accessible and welcoming to the exploration of social, political and multicultural issues.
“Speculative poetry is not only for science fiction and fantasy fans. It is for any human with a heart and a desire to declare that their dreams should be heard.”
Our current theme for submissions is Al Dente. For more information click here.
AL DENTE In cooking, pasta or risotto al dente (/ælˈdɛnteɪ/, Italian: [al ˈdɛnte]; lit. ’to the tooth’) is cooked to be firm to the bite, requiring a brief cooking time. The term also extends to firmly-cooked vegetables. In contemporary Italian cooking, it is considered to be the ideal consistency for pasta.
What does al dente mean to you? To your neighborhood vampire it probably means something different. How about to the prospector mining gold?
Send us something that you haven’t overcooked!
Submissions close on July 5, 2026; the issue publishes SEPTEMBER 1, 2026.
If you’ve never encountered miniMAG before, it’s a literary space built around immediacy, intensity, and voice.
Known for publishing short, powerful work, miniMAG has created a home for writing that lands quickly and lingers. It’s a platform that embraces experimentation, emerging voices, and pieces that don’t always fit neatly into traditional categories. The emphasis has often been on brevity, but more importantly, on impact.
Which is exactly why it’s such an exciting space for Old Scratch Press to step into.
For this upcoming issue, we’re not curating the work. We are the work.
Old Scratch Press is taking over the issue as contributing writers and artists, bringing a collection that reflects the range of what we do. That includes longer pieces alongside shorter ones, visual work alongside written, and voices that move between forms rather than staying confined to one.
This isn’t about fitting into a format. It’s about expanding it.
You’ll find work that holds tension, work that experiments, work that stretches. You’ll find pieces that are immediate and pieces that take their time. And yes, you’ll find writing that pushes beyond the expectation of what “mini” might suggest, and art as well. Many of us make with words and with other mediums too.
At Old Scratch Press, we care deeply about voice, about risk, and about creating space for work that feels alive on the page. This issue of miniMAG gives us the opportunity to bring that energy into a platform already known for bold, concentrated storytelling, and to widen the lens just a bit while we’re there.
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 