Clockhouse — V14 Memoir & Creative Nonfiction

Overview
Clockhouse, an independent literary journal with a long-standing commitment to publishing distinctive voices, invites submissions of memoir and creative nonfiction for its Volume 14 reading period. The call is deliberately broad in aesthetic range: traditional narrative essays and formally experimental work are equally welcome, provided the writing is original, unpublished, and unmistakably the author's own. Academic and scientific essays fall outside the journal's purview; the editors are seeking work that operates within the literary tradition of the personal and the essayistic. The terms are notably clean. There is no submission fee, and the journal has published no prize or payment structure in this call, so contributors should understand acceptance as publication rather than remuneration. What the journal does demand is professional discipline: double-spaced, paginated manuscripts, Word documents preferred, word count noted on the first page, and a bio of approximately 100 words or fewer. The editors state plainly that submissions which do not follow these guidelines will be discarded unread — a reminder that at this level of the field, formatting is not bureaucracy but a first test of seriousness. The curatorial vision here favors work that knows its own shape. A 5,000-word ceiling is generous enough for sustained memoir but tight enough to reward compression and structural intelligence. The explicit welcome of experimental styles signals that the editors are not looking for a single house manner; they are looking for essays and memoirs that justify their formal choices. Writers should read the journal before submitting, not to imitate what they find, but to understand the register in which Clockhouse operates.