STORY PITCHES
Several times a year we put out a call for pitches around a specific theme. If you’re interested in pitching a feature (or Lay of the Land piece), it’s best to keep your eye on this page, or sign up for our eNewsletter (just add your email to the mailing list prompt on the homepage) which will include upcoming and current pitch themes when they come around.
Please note that when we open for submissions we are looking for nonfiction pitches, not full stories. Try to keep pitches to 500 words or so.
In general, we are not able to consider submissions for poetry, fiction, or AI-assisted works at this time, even during an open pitch window.
Submissions WINDOW IS Open!
From August 1- 15 we will be accepting nonfiction story pitches for our Spring 2026 Labor Issue: Working the Land. Send us your ideas on the intersection between labor and the more-than-human world—animal rights, working creatures, and models of collectivity in nature. We can offer $1000 for a full-length feature. Please keep all pitches to 500 words or less.
What Are We looking for?
Thank you for considering submitting your work and ideas to Orion.
Before submitting a pitch, the most important thing we can suggest is that you familiarize yourself Orion and consider how your work is appropriate for our pages. Orion is about exploring environmental and social issues and looking at what and how people are going about addressing them. If this statement feels obtuse to you (besides the bad grammar), spend some time with a few recent back issues and see if it makes any more sense. Though the subjects we explore vary widely and our needs are very broad, we can tell you that we’re typically NOT looking for straight exposés of environmental catastrophes, and we don’t have a frequent need for pretty nature images. Very conceptual work (e.g., “this photo of a hole in a lone tree represents the emptiness of man’s inhumanity to man in a world without nature…”) is also often hard to place in Orion—even when inspired by nature—unless the concepts and subjects line up just right. These are not rules and if they were we’d always be happy to break them, but they do objectively describe most of how we’re using what we’re using at the current time.
As we said and will again, you should be familiar with Orion and pitch on the theme we specifically asking for in a given submission window.
Please also note that we are not an “Art” magazine and do need to think literally about how the context of the work as presented in Orion will help fulfill our broader editorial mission.
Questions? Write to:
submissions@orionmagazine.org
More information here.
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