Joyland Magazine is an online magazine that focuses on prose from different regions across North America. Their regions include New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, the South, and the Midwest, and each region has an editor who reads submissions of short fiction, excerpts from novels, and personal essays. The writer should live in the region or have some sort of connection to it, but the stories themselves do not need to reflect a regional quality. The magazine also publishes a print magazine twice a year, featuring selections from the website. Joyland publishes emerging writers and they post new stories often— once every week— so this is a great place for emerging writers to send in their work.

The prose published in the journal is highly polished and mature. There doesn’t seem to be a unifying theme to the content, except for an interest in regional character which is not necessarily a requirement for submission. From the stories I read on the site, the journal seems to be interested in literary fiction depicting real-life situations, such as the death of a child or the sexual frustration of a middle-aged woman. The majority of the pieces published are traditional in form and depict straightforward narratives, and, as a result, are perhaps not as innovative or interesting as some other types of fiction or creative nonfiction. The style of the writing in much of the writing is academic, and many of the contributors seem to be from MFA faculty or from the MFA world.

My favorite piece that I’ve read from this magazine so far is a short story called “Break All The Way Down,” by Roxane Gay from the Midwest Region. It deals with a similar issue as the one discussed in the story “Of Rivers and Caves” by Adrian Dorris published in the latest issue of Blackbird, but I was struck by how different it was from the piece in Blackbird, which felt very elusive and circumspect in comparison. Both stories are about parents who have lost a child and who have another chance to raise a child, yet they are still haunted by the trauma of their original loss. I found the clarity of the prose in “Break All the Way Down”  and the author’s piercing depiction of the mother’s inexpressible grief to be compelling. The protagonist reminds me of the main female character in “Silver Linings Playbook.” But alas, I digress.

Whether you decide to submit to Joyland Magazine or not, I recommend reading some short fiction published on their website. They seem to be on the forefront of redefining what it means to be an online literary magazine by delivering high-quality writing more frequently than just two or three times a year. It will be interesting to see whether more online journals will turn to this type of periodic publication in the future.

Submission Period:

Year Round

For More Information:

joylandmagazine.com