Submit to Our Toy Issue!

Submissions are now open for our 2025 themed issue! This year, the theme we’ve chosen is TOYS. Send us your poems, stories, and essays that center around toys: Yahtzee, Easy Bake Ovens, Hot Wheels, dolls, trucks, pretend (!) guns, finger paints, marbles, collectibles, family traditions, play, winners, losers, sharing, refusing to share, hand-me-down toys, and more.

You can submit and find more details about what we’re looking for on our Submittable page. Submissions will be open through November 15. Submissions will be free on November 1 only, a day intended for writers who cannot otherwise afford to submit.

Send us work that is playful, that makes a toy of form, plot, characters, or the readers themselves, and isn’t afraid to rule the playground. Consider what makes a game all in good fun and what happens when the fun stops. What about those in-between times, when all the fun is gone and yet, for some reason, we’re still playing? Ask what it means to toy with a person, an idea, or a word. Deal us in, tell us the rules of the game and how to play by them (or not). And by all means, tell us about your actual toys, whether you left them behind in childhood or still cherish them today.

If you’re searching for inspiration, consider some of our favorite “toy” stories, essays, and poems. Frederick Bush’s story “Ralph the Duck” could be about a toy duck, but it also touches on themes of empathy, struggling romance, and loss, to name a few. Dinah Lenney’s essay “The General’s Table” examines tables, especially one used as a play pretend stage, to count the ways we can and cannot know our family. Mary M. Brown’s poem “Classic Toy” asks how a little green army man can engender a commentary on soldiers at war.

Prose writers should submit flash of 1,200 words or less or full-length stories/essays of up to 5,500 words. Poets should submit three to five poems. We will happily accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know right away if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

Accepted contributors will receive our standard honorarium of $100 for full-length prose, $50 for flash prose, and $50 per poem.

Please reach out to us at ihlr.mail@gmail.com with any questions. Come and play in our sandbox!