Encourage people to share their work with us. The journal always loves submissions, and if you or your friends have a work you’re proud of, don’t hesitate to send it our way! Brushfire accepts submissions to be considered year-round. 

The date to be considered for the Fall edition is October 14th, while the cut-off date for the Spring edition is March 14th. 

Keep in mind that Brushfire only accepts submissions through the website Submittable, and the platform is user friendly!

Brushfire also is always searching for student and local artists to spotlight on our website! Help us out by connecting us with interested artists or writers. 

Know or are someone who would like to be spotlighted? Let us know through our contact page!

August 1st – November 4th & January 1st – April 4th

The bulk of our efforts go into our reviewing our submissions. Brushfire gets a lot of submissions, and we want to make sure as many perspectives interact with each piece as possible. 

Brushfire receives the most writing, including poetry, prose, and short stories both fiction and nonfiction. Brushfire also receives all forms of 2D artwork from paintings to pencil and charcoal drawings to photography of all types of subjects. We’re always excited to dive into each submission we receive, and it’s in these review panels that our editors work through the pieces and decide what will end up in the final journal.

November 4th – November 18th & April 4th – April 18th

After our editors read and look through all of our submissions, we’ll have a general idea of the pieces we want to build our journal with. All these pieces are organized in our google drive, where we then begin the process of deciding which pieces work well together. 

Our team then focuses on making connections between art and writing, deciding what pieces would work well on the page together. All our staff works together in this process, providing opinions on if, for example, a certain photograph works better with a certain poem or a different short story.  

Once we have pairings we like and a few visual art candidates for full stand-alone pages, we’ll start putting the pieces into the program we use to build the journal – Adobe InDesign. 

At this step the journal will be bare bones with no designs added in yet. Our focus in this stage is to finalize the order of our pairings, cutting, adding, and rearranging pieces in order to have the best narrative momentum. This is the stage where we really decide what the general concept and broader themes of the journal we’re producing is. these two weeks of submission pairing is the time when Brushfire has to do the heaviest lifting. 

November 18th – December 5th & April 18th – May 5th 

Once the process of paring submissions and finalizing their order finishes, we’re down to making things pretty! Our visual arts director works with the rest of the team in deciding what background colors work best with the paired pieces, how things should sit on the page, and what additional design details we can add to make the journal pop in Adobe InDesign!

November 18th – December 5th & April 18th – May 5th 

While Journal Design is revving up, our copy editors don’t miss out on the fun either! Each piece has to be carefully read and prepared for publication. Brushfire’s copy-editing process makes sure there aren’t any spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, or other issues in our written pieces. We also make sure artist and writers’ names are properly inputted, as well as keeping a keen eye out for anything that isn’t where it should be! 

(Phoebe here breaking away from the Brushfire ‘we’ of this page so far, but I personally love copy-editing. It’s one of my favorite parts of the whole journal process! There’s something really satisfying about polishing up the pieces and making them as perfect for publication as they can be.)