Welcome to the Good Life! 🐝
⭐ November Updates: Submissions for the 2025 HoneyBee prize are now open! ⭐ Micro Monday Feature subs have reached their cap and are now closed. ⭐
The Good Life Review is an online literary journal committed to exploring the overlooked. Based out of Omaha, Nebraska—astride the oft unnoticed—we recognize that there are a myriad of voices that call the regions surrounding us home. Our mission is to lift up the strange, the daring, and the underrepresented to reveal complexities hidden in the heartland and beyond.
We are currently open for multiple publication opportunities for fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and art. We nominate for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and pay $60 per piece of writing for our seasonal issues and $25 for Micro Monday Features.
General guidelines are as follows:
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted as long as we are promptly made aware of acceptance elsewhere. Simply withdraw in Submittable – or – for individual flash pieces or poems, send a message via Submittable indicating which title(s) are being withdrawn.
- The Good Life Review acquires First North American Serial Rights and the right to maintain an archive copy of work online. All other rights revert to author upon publication with a request that if the work is reprinted, appropriate acknowledgment to The Good Life Review is made.
- We do not publish offensive work or pieces which exhibit hatred directed toward a particular gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexual identity, age, socioeconomic class, or other status, regardless of protected by law. In other words—if you are an asshole, we don’t want your writing or your money.
- Each submissions should include work from only one genre/category (for example do not create a submission with both fiction and poetry unless it is to be considered as a hybrid piece).
- We prefer to read blind so please remove your name from the submitted document.
- Your submission will NOT be disqualified if it was submitted incorrectly. We will not penalize you for a mistake and if we have a question or concern about your submission, we will contact you. Please know that we are on your side. Thank you for trusting us with your work.
- Work must be original and previously uncurated. Please reference this thoughtful article by Tim Green on curation versus publication. We want your very best!
Currently Supported Genres:
Poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, micro fiction, short cnf, flash cnf, micro cnf, and any of the aforementioned translated from Spanish to English (with the original author's permission).
Reading Periods:
The Good Life Review is always open. Reading and selection for our seasonal issues is based on the following schedule:
January 21 – July 20 (Autumn Issue). Final decisions in August.
July 21 – January 20 (Spring Issue). Final decisions in February.
October 21 – April 20 (Summer Honeybee Prize Issue). Final decisions in June.
We publish micro pieces on a semi-monthly basis on TGLR Buzz ~ Micro Monday. Work submitted to any category/project that meet the micro requirement (under 500 words) will also be under consideration for this segment.
We are always open for artwork to be featured in our seasonal issues and pay $50 for artwork selected for an issue cover. Art subs are free to submit.
If a project is not listed / available, it means we have reached our submission cap and our editors are busy working through the queue.
To get an sense for the kind of work we publish, please visit thegoodlifereview.com/
Does your original photography or artwork tell a story? We are currently looking for pieces to feature in our next issue. There are no specific guidelines and the only requirement is that artwork must be original. We would encourage you to check out our latest issue @ https://thegoodlifereview.com/ to see if we would be a good home for your work.
We're a 501C3 nonprofit organization and every member of our staff is a volunteer. We strive to provide a beautiful platform for artists and writers to showcase and share their work and want your experience with TGLR to be a postive one, but are only able to pay for artwork used on the cover of our seasonal issues at this time -- $50 as of the spring 2024 issue. We appreciate the love that goes into every piece and hope that we can pay all artists for their efforts in the future.
* Also of note * We currently don't require first rights or file contracts for images and therefore, by submitting, you acknowledge and authorize publication if accepted. The only exception to this is if you explicitly withdraw the entire submission or send a note/email letting us know the piece or pieces that are no longer available.
We will respond to all submitted work, however, pieces we have a particular interest in may remain "in process" for the duration of a calendar year. Our aim is to select pieces that visually complement the writing accepted for our seasonal issues and therefore we don't know what might make a good match until the writing is selected. Thank you in advance for your patience.
Work submitted here will be considered for our Sprint 2025 issue (online). We publish poetry, flash fiction, flash nonfiction, short fiction, short nonfiction, and Spanish translations. Payment for this issue is $60 per published piece of writing ($75 for two pieces).
The title of your submission should be the same as the title of the story or poem. For multiple poems or flash prose, please include all titles.
Genre guidelines are as follows:
For Fiction and Creative Nonfiction:
- We consider original, previously unpublished stories and essays up to 5000 words (if it’s a little more, we will keep reading, but the story has to earn it). Please select the correct category on the form so the submission can be routed to the correct editorial team.
- For flash and micro, no more than 3 pieces in a single submission.
- Submissions should be typed, double-spaced and paginated with one-inch margins and a 12 point serif font, preferably Times New Roman in Word or PDF format.
- We prefer to read blind so please remove your name from the submitted document.
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For Poetry:
- We consider original, previously unpublished poems in formal, free verse, and experimental forms.
- There is no length limit on individual poems, but please send no more than 5 poems per submission and no more than 10 pages in total.
- Poems should be typed with at least one-inch margins and a 12 point serif font, preferably Times New Roman in Word or PDF format. We do our best to format poems to the exact specification desired but those with long lines may wrap unconditionally when rendered on some tablets and mobile phones.
- We prefer to read blind so please remove your name from the submitted document.
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We support Spanish translations as long as the rights to translate have been previously acquired.
A comprehensive set of guidelines can be found on the submission page of our website.
We will respond to all submitted work, however, it may take from one to seven months depending on when the work is submitted within the given reading period. Thank you in advance for your patience.
This year the prize payout is $2000 across 5 genres.
Four to six finalists in each genre – short fiction, flash fiction, short creative nonfiction, flash creative nonfiction, and poetry – will be selected by our current editorial teams and sent to our guest judges who will select a winner. The judges this year are TBD and will be announced sometime this winter.
The winning entry in each of the five categories will receive $300, publication in our summer 2025 issue, and a jar of honey from a Midwest apiary. 🍯 Other select finalists will also be invited to be published in the issue with an honorarium of $75.
The contest fee is $18. Finalists will be announced in May and winners in June. Response time on contest submissions may be up to six months depending on the submission date. Thank you in advance for your patience.
Other submission guidelines are the same as our regular publication guidelines. We will not consider previously published work and request that all personal identifiable information is removed from the submitted manuscript. For a comprehensive set of guidelines and genre specific details, please visit our general submission page.
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For Prose:
- We consider original, previously unpublished stories and essays up to 5000 words (if it’s a little more, we will keep reading, but the story has to earn it). Please select the correct genre on the form so the submission can be routed to the correct editorial team. Short is 1000-5000, flash is up to 1000 words.
- For flash, submit 1 to 3 pieces in a single submission.
- Submissions should be typed, double-spaced and paginated with one-inch margins and a 12 point serif font, preferably Times New Roman in Word or PDF format.
- We prefer to read blind so please remove your name from the submitted document.
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For Poetry:
- We consider original, previously unpublished poems in formal, free verse, and experimental forms.
- There is no length limit on individual poems, but please send no more than 5 poems per submission and no more than 10 pages in total.
- Poems should be typed with at least one-inch margins and a 12 point serif font, preferably Times New Roman in Word or PDF format. We do our best to format poems to the exact specification desired but those with long lines may wrap unconditionally when rendered on some tablets and mobile phones.
- We prefer to read blind so please remove your name from the submitted document.
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We support Spanish translations as long as the rights to translate have been previously acquired.
We will respond to all submitted work, however, it may take from one to six months depending on when the work is submitted within the given reading period. Thank you in advance for your patience.