We welcome submissions of short stories, personal narratives of illness, creative nonfiction, poetry and visual art. Two issues of Ars Medica are printed per year. The deadline for submission to the Spring issue is February 28, and July 30 for the Fall issue. Submission by that date does not ensure review and consideration for the upcoming edition. Each submission is reviewed by our editorial board. We will try to provide a response within 6 months of receipt of submission.
Please see the bottom of this page for some further writing suggestions.
Guidelines for Submissions
1. E-mail submissions are preferred, with Microsoft Word attachments only.
2. Poetry should be typed single-spaced up to two pages, and prose double-spaced to a maximum of 3000 words. We recommend sending poetry as an attachment, to protect formatting.
3. We will not consider previously published manuscripts or visual art, and a signed statement that the work is original and unpublished is required. Copyright remains with the artist or author.
4. Payment will consist of copies of the issue in which the accepted work appears.
5. Please indicate word count on your manuscript and provide full contact information: name, address, phone number, fax, e-mail address.
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6.Please submit manuscripts to arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
On Writing For Ars Medica:
We are often asked about which qualities we look for when we select a piece
for publication in Ars Medica. Members of our Editorial Board and our
Advisory Board come from diverse healthcare and literary backgrounds, and
the short answer is , "We know good writing when we see it." Those of us
who do clinical work and encounter narratives of illness everyday have come
to identify what feels honest, fleshed out, embodied. We have become
demanding readers to the extent that familiar stories of diagnosis and
treatment have to bring something new and particular to the telling and to
our experience. All of the usual rules of storytelling (and writing
workshops ) still apply: Create characters we care about and let them speak
through dialogue. Show us their world through almost cinematic detail,
don't just tell us it exists. Build dramatic tension within a structure of a
beginning, a middle and an end. If you're writing non-fiction, let yourself
enter the piece so we know why you were moved to write about it. Keep up
the pacing so we want to know what happens. Leave us feeling something, be
it confused, uncomfortable, enlightened, curious or wanting more. Work on
your voice as a writer. Readers, like patients, want to be in good hands
and to remember what was told and how.
Endings don't have to be happy or tidy. As Board Member Rebecca Garden says:
I look for work that defies expectations and conventions, whether formally
or in terms of content. We all shoulder the burden of conventional
narratives and tropes of illness and medicine. The work we publish should
communicate in surprising and arresting ways and break through the dominant
narratives of illness (e.g. courageous battles ending in triumph or
uplift)."
James Wood., in his book, " How Fiction Works," describes something he
calls "thisness" -the sense that a detail or quality is so intrinsic to the
thing it describes, that we can't imagine it otherwise.
Some of us also like to become disoriented , "defamiliarized," to turn a
conventional description on its head. (The images we publish can do this
too. Some of you will remember Jane Martin's cover of a bouquet of roses
juxtaposed against her husband's fresh post-op cranial scar. Beautiful and
unexpected).
We primarily receive submissions from writers about being a patient (or
their family member) or about being a professional (a doctor, nurse or
healthcare worker).
In the former, we sometimes encounter unprocessed details which have
specific, charged meaning for the teller but which are unclear to the
reader. These pieces in many ways resemble journaling or therapeutic
writing. The author is too close to the events or uses personal code and
short-hand which leave gaps. As a result, we are not fully invited into the
experience. Stories of trauma and loss are often fragmented, because they
remain so for the writer and have not yet been crafted through the personal
and creative steps which render them coherent and universal.
Writing personal narratives may indeed be healing, but to be literary,
there needs to be distance, an "observer's eye" which allows us to see the
full picture.
In the latter category-stories by healthcare professionals-we often see too
much detachment. Diagnostic efficiency cuts to the chase ,abbreviates or
over-simplifies the story and fills it with jargon, acronyms and even
cliché.These narratives are journalistic or more like a rushed case
presentation . The subjective is edited out and the reader may know what to
think, but not what to feel.
Sometimes, we get the sense that a story has been misappropriated, that the
author -clinician has not obtained permission to tell it from the client
or patient who lived it or else the author has not fully moved the piece
from fact to fiction. Our position is that re-telling something shared in
confidence in a defined therapeutic context is unethical unless the
patient's co-construction is fully acknowledged or else the narrative has
moved well beyond the personal and particular.
In contrast, some of the most compelling pieces we receive are written by
doctors or nurses who have become patients themselves. Suddenly the world
they know so well has to be re-explained and re-examined, as if encountered
for the first time. Everything is suddenly new. And terrifying.
Each issue of ARS MEDICA embodies many of these ingredients in its stories
and poems of birth, illness, ageing and the death of loved ones. We are
introduced to doctors, nurses and other clinicians who either care too
little, too much or struggle with finding the right balance with each
patient. We meet patients trying to find their way as they navigate
illnesses and forge new identities.
We encourage authors to read a sample copy of the journal before they
submit works and to refer to our submission guidelines on this webpage .
Individual copies of Ars Medica can be ordered from
lkonigshaus@mtsinai.on.ca; To subscribe, please go to www.utpjournals.com.
