Heart on Our Sleeves Press is opening up submissions again for our fifth issue! We’ll be accepting work for a three-month period: from April 17, 2026 to June 17, 2026.
Our fifth theme, “Show or Tell,” is focused on pieces that are either entirely raw emotion or entirely old, hard calculation.
From the “theme” section of our website:
We’ve all heard the old adage “show, don’t tell.”
This is a phrase often lobbed at newbie writers, a pithy way to summarize a so-called fundamental truth of creative writing: that you must use sensory details, actions, and dialogue to immerse readers in a story rather than merely state the events or thought processes of characters verbatim.
Yet, things are rarely so black and white. In actuality, writing tends to have a healthy dose of both show and tell, depending on what the scene or work requires in any given moment.
But what if we only picked one or the other?
What if we were all raw, exposed nerve or “just the facts, ma’am”? What if we challenged ourselves to be 100% intuitive or 100% cerebral, for one piece only?
For Heart on Our Sleeves Press’s fifth issue, we invite you to do just that. Give us a show–or tell it to us straight. What will it be then? Bleeding-heart sentiment or no-frills reporting?
The stage, as always, is yours to command.
We strongly encourage you to read our submission guidelines in their entirety before you enter. (Please remember to submit only one piece per person!)
Include in your submission: your name, a brief bio (less than two hundred words), and a method of contact (if different from email). Although we will have access to this information, selection will still remain anonymous and merit-based; attached files will be downloaded without identifying features and shuffled for maximum objectivity.
