SUBMISSIONS

Guidelines for contributors

At carte blanche we believe there is more than one way to tell a story. Our mandate is to provide a venue for narrative of all forms from fiction and nonfiction, to poetry and photo essays.

carte blanche is published twice a year, in the spring and the fall.

How to submit

We accept original, previously unpublished submissions through our  online submission form ONLY. See carte-blanche.submishmash.com/submit for instructions. If you have problems using our submission form, please send us an email

Deadlines

Spring issue – March 1st (May publication)
Fall issue – September 15th (November publication)

Our reviewing period is in the few weeks following each deadline date. We do not accept new submissions during this period. Come back after our issue launch to submit for the next issue.

How to format

Text should be in Word and double-spaced (except poetry). We like it if you use Verdana 10 pt as your font.

The first page of each submission must include the author’s name, the name of the piece, its length, the category of submission, and a short bio. Each page should be numbered and include a header or footer with the name of the piece and author name. If you are submitting more than one piece, please upload each poem, story or file separately. Make it easy for us!

Simultaneous submissions: We accept simultaneous submissions. Please indicate on your cover page if you are sending your piece elsewhere and notify us immediately if it is accepted somewhere else.

Rights: We ask for first world serial rights and the right to archive your work on the website. Copyright reverts to the author upon publication.

Payment: carte blanche pays a modest honorarium per submission. We hope to increase the amount in the future.

What to send

Fiction and Nonfiction

We like narrative: a story that moves from some kind of a beginning to some kind of an end, be it short fiction, memoir, personal essay or literary journalism. If it’s well written and tells a story, we’ll consider it.

Word limit: 3500 words; maximum of two prose submissions per author per issue; each submission must be on a separate document and uploaded separately.

Poetry

Send us your best work.  From odes and haikus to free verse and sonnets, we welcome poems in any form.  Limit: 3 poems per person per submission round. Please upload each poem separately.

Translations

We accept English translations of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction written originally in French. If possible, please include the original work on which the translation is based. If we like your piece and choose to publish it, you will be required to provide proof of permission from the copyright holder of the original work to translate and publish the translation. Obtaining permission can take time, so please do so before you submit!

Graphic fiction

Along with your work, please include a brief overview of what the piece is about. If your work is selected for publication, we will contact you for a high-res version.  Final submissions must be in JPG, GIF, or PNG format.

Photography

Tell a story in 12 photos or fewer. Together, your photos should create a narrative – whether abstract or concrete – and have something to say.

Send a Word or PDF doc with your work pasted in it and include a statement, captions, and any other relevant text. If your work is selected for publication, we will contact you for a high-res version of the photo essay. Final submissions must be in JPG or PNG format.

Audio

Tell us a story in sound. This can include soundscape, documentary, spoken word, author readings, comedy, experimental, etc. Audio pieces do not need to contain words (although they can!) but they should have a

narrative progression, i.e. a beginning, middle, and end. 5 minute max per piece, submissions should be mp3 or wav files.

~ ~ ~

Now, time to use our handy online submission form!

Once you have registered, created an account, and uploaded your work, you can come back to check your status. Our reviewing period is in the few weeks following each deadline date (once in the spring, once in the fall). Depending on when you submit, please allow enough time for us to process the submissions and make our decisions. During this period we will be closed for submissions. Come back after our issue launch to submit again for the next issue.

Please keep in mind that we are a largely volunteer organization and that we have limited resources and time. But we will look at your work. Promise.

Multimedia Storytelling Series

The kdmcBerkeley Fall 2012 Multimedia Storytelling Series is brought to you by the world's premier center for applied digital communications. All workshops are led by UC Berkeley lecturers and staff, with presentations from award-winning faculty and industry leaders to give you the skills to distinguish you as an expert in digital media.

Video Storytelling

October 11-13, 2012
Learn from master storytellers techniques for capturing the attention of your audience to create engaging videos. This intensive three-day workshop is an immersion in digital video storytelling, providing hands-on video training in every phase of planning, production and digital delivery. This workshop delivers the same world-class training the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism provides its graduate students.

Register Today

Social Media for Audience Engagement

October 22-23, 2012
Beyond expanding the pool of possible connections to near limitless possibilities, social media is reshaping how we communication, learn, entertain ourselves, participate in politics and public life, search for new employees, transact business, and company-consumer relationships. Join us for two days of comprehensive training on how to leverage the power of social media and storytelling to develop audiences, trust relationships and engagement.

Register Today

Data Driven Maps

November 16-17, 2012
Data driven maps are an effective visual tool to communicate ideas, explain complex concepts, illustrate relationships or tell a story with data. This two-day workshop is a hands-on program focused on applying Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tools to visualize data with industry standard techniques. Participants will learn to use publicly available map files and data to build layered and informative maps that are easy to understand and fun to view.

Register Today

Visual Essentials for Content Creators

December 10-14, 2012
Communications professionals, journalists and educators seeking a rapid-paced immersive experience in best practices for telling stories on the web with video, photos and data will benefit from this workshop. This intensive one-week production course focuses on the art and craft of digital storytelling and features hands-on practical skills training.

Register Today

To learn more please contact:
Vicki Hammarstedt
+1.510.642.3892
Http://kdmc.berkeley.edu

Dear This American Life friends and contributors,
This is Brian Reed writing, a producer here at TAL. Thanks so much for your responses to the last theme list. We're working on another show for early October, and we'd love to hear any pitches and ideas you have for it. Right now we're considering two themes for this show, and it could go either way depending on the stories we get. Even though the themes are similar, they might spark different kinds of ideas so I wanted to send out both for your consideration. Here they are:

WHEN IT RAINS IT POURS
Why do bad things always seem to happen all at once? And good things too? In either case, how are you supposed to deal with it all? We have one piece for this show where a comedian who's just had a string of horrible things happen to her — including getting diagnosed with cancer — goes on stage in front of a live audience and cracks jokes about all of it. We have another story about a guy who has a lot of misfortune befall him and then gets caught in a very strange and cathartic situation…in an actual rainstorm. We're looking for more stories about people who come up with inventive and surprising ways to deal with a barrage of misfortune. Or fortune. In fact, we're particularly interested in stories about lots of good things happening to someone, since we already have stories about negative things. And it doesn't only need to be about individual people — it could be a story about an organization or a town or a school. Maybe a place that had so many good things happen to it at once, people were overwhelmed and didn't really deal with it so gracefully. A story about someone with a strange superstition that seems to affect his or her fortune could work in this show too.

WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU…
This show would be about people who've made it through incredibly trying and even life-threatening situations and emerged with an interesting or surprising take on what happened to them. The saying goes "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," but it seems like a lot of times if something doesn't kill you, you end up not necessarily stronger, but different, having come to some understanding about yourself that you didn't have before. We have one story for this show about a woman with a severe mental illness that gave her compulsions to ingest things — like nails and screws — that put her life in danger. She's well now, and talks about why it felt so satisfying to do things that were so damaging to her. Another story we're considering is about a guy who was shot in Chicago, who then made amends with his shooter and refused to rat on him to police. But stories for this show don't need to be about actual life-threatening situations. Relative hardship would work too — like a story about a kid who was picked on a lot, or someone who faced repeated rejection. These could even be funny stories. Or maybe there's a story about a person who's trying desperately to get rid of someone or something, but with every tactic they try the person or thing only seems to get stronger and more impossible to get rid of.

For these two themes only, please send your pitches directly to me at brian@thislife.org.

Also, we wanted to make one last request for anecdotes for our upcoming RED/BLUE show, which we included in our last theme list: We’re interested in your best examples of just how ridiculously toxic our political discourse has become – particularly in cases where friends and family members are at odds. Are there people who you (or your friends) no longer spend time with because of their political views? Plans that have been cancelled or friendships put on hold? In general, we’d welcome any stories that illustrate the inanity of the red/blue war through the toll it’s taken on personal relationships.

Please send pitches for RED/BLUE to TAL producer Lisa Pollak at lisa@thislife.org.

As always, many thanks for your pitches. We're very appreciative!

A couple of opportunities from our colleagues at KUOW – please let them know AIR sent you!

KUOW is hiring an editor who will report to Senior Editor Jim Gates:
http://bit.ly/RJEQ7P

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KUOW PVF GRANT AVAILABLE FOR RADIO PROJECTS

KUOW is accepting radio project proposals for Round 22 of our Program Venture Fund (PVF). The PVF provides special support for staff and independent producers to develop new programming focused on the Puget Sound region in Washington state.

Programs funded by the PVF can be a series of features, a long form documentary or a variety of short audio pieces. There is no set format. Projects must have a connection to Washington’s Puget Sound region. In the past, PVF funds have been used as seed money to launch projects. The grant is meant to provide radio reporters and producers the time and money to dig into a subject, bring new voices to the air and share the history, culture and issues that impact the Puget Sound region.

Important: Before submitting a full application you need to send me a short description of your project, no longer than a page. Once the preliminary idea is approved then you can officially submit the full application. All instructions are at our website (see below).

The application deadline is Friday, October 5, 2012 at 5:00 pm (PT)
For application information go to www.kuow.org/pvf
Contact: Jim Gates – jgates@kuow.org

We look forward to hearing your radio ideas! Below are links to past PVF projects.

Jim Gates

Senior Editor

KUOW 94.9 – Puget Sound Public Radio
206.221.0747
www.kuow.org

Check out our most recent PVF projects:

More than A Tree
Reporter: Sarah Waller
http://www.kuow.org/specials/more-than-a-tree.php

Refugees In Puget Sound: Navigating A New Home In The Northwest
Reporter: Jessica Partnow
http://kuow.org/specials/refugees-in-puget-sound.php

We need your help!

“Working Now” (http://www.workingnow.org) is an online collaborative
project about the working lives of people today around the world. We
also want to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the book “Working” by
oral historian/radio producer Studs Terkel
(http://bit.ly/StudsWorking). The project is supported by a SoundCloud
Fellowship so we have funding to pay producers for the first seven
pieces of new original work. The project is being “seeded” by alumni
of the Transom Story Workshop but we welcome contributions from other
radio producers, storytellers and working people themselves.

Here’s what we’re looking for: Audio stories that are

Length: Ideally three-five minutes long. We’re also open to even
shorter stories, i.e. audio postcards or sonic IDs.

Language: in English (possibly also Spanish in the near future)

Subject matter: Interviews with
– Workers (or recently unemployed people) whose jobs have changed
since being profiled in“Working”
– People with unique or unusual jobs that did not exist in 1974 (when
“Working” was published)
– Individuals profiled in “Working” (or their surviving families)
– Raw audio files submitted by workers themselves.

Style: We are open to all styles of radio stories but kind of prefer
non-narrated oral history-style pieces.

Originality: We want both original and existing radio stories. We
welcome pieces that have already been broadcast or posted online. For
the purposes of the project, however, we can only pay producers for
new original work that has not yet aired or has been posted online for
more than six months. Once new work has been posted on this website,
producers are then welcome to seek other outlets for their pieces. We
also encourage you to upload your work to PRX.

Format and how to submit tracks:
– For previously aired or existing online stories, please email the
weblink to an embeddable player (i.e. SoundCloud, PRX, etc.) to
workingnow.audio@gmail.com
– For original stories, please upload MP3s that are 46 KHZ 16 bit to
our Dropbox http://soundcloud.com/workingnow/dropbox

The deadline is next week, Tuesday, September 4th

To submit to:

ROUGH CUTS – September 2012
Tuesday, September 25th at 7:30 p.m.

Ninth Street Independent Film Center

145 Ninth Street, between Mission and Howard, San Francisco

Complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres provided
$7 admission

_____________________________________________________

Rough Cuts is a series of work-in-progress documentary screenings that are produced every other month at a variety of locations throughout San Francisco. For each evening, we screen one rough cut of a feature-length documentary and then moderate a conversation about the film. These post-screening discussions are designed to give the filmmaker a better, more objective sense of what is working and not working with his/her film, with particular attention paid to improving the film’s structure and narrative clarity. We hope that the series also provides a welcome space for local filmmakers, film professionals, and fans of documentary film to meet and talk.

We are seeking long-form works with a final running time of 40 minutes or longer. Principal photography should have been completed, and we encourage filmmakers to submit cuts that are in the later stages of post-production (i.e. NOT first or second cuts).

Tuesday, September 4th

Submissions must arrive at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center by 5:00 p.m. [This is not a postmark deadline.]

Wednesday, September 12th

Selections will be announced and filmmakers will be notified

Tuesday, September 25th

Screenings, followed by discussions led by a guest moderator

To submit, and for more details about Rough Cuts, visit:
http://sfroughcuts.com/

Opening Reception – Rag Theater: The 2400 Block of Telegraph Avenue, 1969-1973

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NACIO JAN BROWN

When: Friday, September 7

Reception: 6:00 PM
Lecture: 7:00 PM

Where: Room 105 North Gate Hall 

Nacio Jan Brown's photographs stop time and record this circle of life he knows so well, saving it from the too-quick and too-dead past for us to view with new eyes. Yet even as, through the grace of his commitment to this block, we take in what is already long gone, surely the lives continue, and, though nothing remains the same, surely right now, at this very moment, the block is alive…From the “Foreword” to Rag Theater, © 1971 by Thomas Farber

Exhibition on view in North Gate Hall: August 27th – January 11th, 2013

Robin Shulman | Eat the City

When: Monday, September 17,  12:00 PM

Where: North Gate Hall Library

Robin Shulman will discuss her new book Eat the City. The book tells the story of past and present brewers, butchers, slaughterers, sugar refiners, winemakers, beekeepers, and farmers whose food production helped build New York City, showing that urban food production is no new trend, but has always shaped the life of American cities.

Robin Shulman has worked as a journalist for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, Slate, the Guardian, and other publications. She has reported extensively from the Middle East, as well as the cities, suburbs, and rural areas of the United States. She graduated from the J-School in 2002.

RSVP REQUIRED
Seth Rosenfeld | Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power

When: Wednesday, September 19,  7:00 PM