Submission Windows: December 1st – 6th, 2025
Payment: 6 cents/word and a contributors copy
Theme: Eco-Fiction, Eco-Horror, Eco-Gothic, Haunted, Transcorporeality, Eco-Surrealism
Note: This is an early listing and you’ll need to follow the blog for final submission guidelines and where to submit. This post will be updated when those details are shared.
Rotting Leaf Mag is a new online, literary magazine that will be published under the Brief Ecology umbrella. This will be a place for literary and experimental explorations of the eco-gothic, the eco-horrific, the eco-surrealist, and the eco-weird.
Rotting Leaf Magazine stories will be free to read, and will be delivered via email in exactly the same way as all other Brief Ecology newsletters. You do not need to subscribe to anything additional if you’re already a Brief Ecology reader. The pieces will also be available to read on the Brief Ecology website.
Our first piece will be published in January, 2026. We will publish one new piece per month, and then an in-print anthology collection at the end of the year. Each piece may also be accompanied by a short essay on Eco-Fiction from the corresponding author. These essays will go out first to paid subscribers of Brief Ecology.
More formal submission guidelines will be made available soon, but for now, here are the basics for Year One:
- The first round of submissions will open in December.
- Submission windows will open on the first of each month: For one week or until 50 submissions are received, whichever occurs first.
- Payment: $0.06/word ($30 minimum) + contributor copy of annual anthology
- Words: 1,500 or less
- Simultaneous submissions are allowed (as they should always be)
- Things we’ll be looking for
- Eco-fiction (broadly defined)
- Eco-Horror
- Eco-Gothic/Anti-gothic
- Haunted/Unhaunted Landscapes
- Transcorporeality
- Eco-Surrealism/Existentialism/Absurdism
- Complex Characters and Interiority, Unreliable Narrators, Metafiction
- Any other uses of Eco-Fiction that challenge, shift, or obliterate the nature-society binary
- Each published author will be offered an additional, optional by-line in the form of a mini-essay (500 words or less) to respond the the question: “What does ‘Eco-Fiction’ mean?”
- Contract details: Story rights will return to the author immediately upon publication, but RLM reserves print publishing rights for annual anthology.
Via: Brief Ecology.
