Stewardship Stories
What are stewardship stories?
Simply put: stewardship stories are stories about how to do ecological stewardship.
What does it look like to do stewardship in reality? What are all the ways stewardship can be practiced? Where is stewardship happening?
What kinds of ecological stewardship are you practicing, and how do you conduct this practice? Tell us all about so we can help others learn about how to do stewardship too!
Stewardship stories can take many forms, starting as hybrid nonfiction works that may include audiovisual elements. We’d love to see these stories transform into a podcast series, or perhaps a documentary video series we can host on Vimeo or YouTube. In service of providing these stories as open educational resources (OER) we envision offering all of these media elements with Creative Commons licensing.
We are building our own stewardship stories as well, such as tracking the growth of several species of amphibians adjacent to Little Glade Creek in Glade Valley, North Carolina.
Guidelines
Currently, due to staff limitations, submissions must be written in English.
These are open themed submissions, so please consider anything as a potential for publication in The Upper New Review.
Submissions must be previously unpublished, in print or online. Publication does not include personal blogs, social media posts, etc.
Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere, and withdraw your submission from consideration.
We’re open to all subject matter, with the exception that we will not publish anything containing gratuitous sexual content. It’s certainly reasonable for your stewardship story to concern reproductive issues for any number of species, including humans.
Responses for any submission can take up to eight months, with variations depending on the contents of the submission and the time of year. Typically, we will strive to have a response for your submission within two months. If it has been six months since you submitted, and you have not heard from us, please do send us a follow-up inquiry!
Specific Rules
For your submission, you may submit one manuscript document.
If you have multiple stewardship stories you’d like to submit, we want to consider them! Up to four additional manuscript documents may be submitted (with an additional media fee for each) allowing a total of five stewardship story manuscript documents per submission.
The minimum word count for your stewardship story manuscript is 3000 words. We don’t really have a maximum word count for stewardship stories. However: anything over 20,000 words will really need to keep our interest, and likely we’ll need to serialize it if we accept for publication, but that’s okay!
If you’ve created diagrams, illustrations, photographs, or any sorts of static visual imagery to supplement your stewardship stories, please embed these images directly into the manuscript where relevant.
If you’ve created audio recordings or videos to supplement your stewardship stories, please include placeholders like [video here] in your manuscript, and provide us with a YouTube or Vimeo link to your streaming video file (or SoundCloud, etc. for audio files). If we need a password to access the file, please include the password.
Any submission not strictly adhering to the guidelines will be automatically rejected. Resubmissions adhering to guidelines are allowed. You will start a new submission and pay the requisite fees.
