Submit works of fiction, interviews, or nonfiction to staff@portlandmonthly.com.
Recognized for “original regional coverage and literary merit” by the New York Public Library, award-winning Portland Magazine is proud to publish some of the finest magazine features and short fiction on the market today.
We buy First North American Serial Rights and repeat internet rights into perpetuity as part of online archiving.
All manuscripts should be thoroughly spell-checked before submitted to submittable.com; it is the writer’s responsibility to ensure all proper nouns and dates cited are correct as well.
In matters of style, please follow the Chicago Manual of Style (we use a comma before the conjunction in a series, as in “red, white, and blue”). Please skip only one space after a period. All names of states, months, and days should be spelled out. Contractions are fine, and spell out numbers below 10.
We pay on publication; please ensure your manuscript has your complete name, address, email, and telephone numbers.
Consider carefully before you mail or email your assigned story to us, because WE CANNOT ACCEPT FOLLOW-UP SUBMISSIONS OR CHANGES, no matter how tantalizing they may seem. We must only receive the complete fact-checked and spell-checked manuscript, with nothing pending.
Another way to get a feel for our feature style is to read the stories made available to viewers on this site. There, you’ll see that:
We vastly prefer live quotes to paraphrase.
We match our surface action to the time of year our story will appear.
Our target audience is our 100,000 readers, ages 18-90. We write for our readers alone, and while in many cases we’re delighted when our interview subjects enjoy our stories once they’re in print, we are not writing for them but only for our readers. Interview subjects may not ever read or hear any portion of our stories before the stories are printed, and in the interest of objective distance, interview subjects are never to be promised complimentary copies of the magazine. It is the writer’s responsibility to return all materials such as photos or illustrations to the interview subjects providing them.
Once you have an assignment, you are not to discuss the story’s title, premise, or hook with anyone until after you see the magazine on the newsstands.
Our magazine features are written in the present tense, with speaker attribution in the present tense. We like to bring all five senses into a feature. We reserve the unrestricted right to edit your story.
We try to impose a story arc on even the shortest magazine articles.
It is our job to get quotes from impossible-to-get subjects — why try for less?
We love extraordinary perspective, as well as fresh images. Dare to astonish our readers at Portland Magazine. We look forward to working with you.
