Practice: A Rural Anthology

Submission Window: July 1–31, 2026

Backwoods Literary Press is now accepting submissions for Practice: A Rural Anthology, our third annual anthology celebrating the stories, voices, and creative work rooted in rural life.

This year, we're exploring what it means to be in practice: to keep doing things by hand, by memory, and by effort in a world increasingly pulled toward speed, automation, and distraction. It's about returning to something again and again: caring for one another, learning by doing, and sustaining the people and places we call home.

We're interested in work that feels lived rather than polished, writing that pays attention to the ordinary acts that sustain people and places. Practice can be devotion, craft, labor, caregiving, organizing, survival, ritual, or repair. It can be inherited or chosen, joyful or difficult. It might look like tending a garden, mending clothes, raising children, preserving traditions, showing up for neighbors, making art, unlearning harmful patterns, or simply continuing when no one is watching.

Rural communities are shaped by countless practices that often go unnoticed: mountain songs, folk and traditional medicine, land stewardship, cooking, storytelling, caregiving, mutual aid, craftsmanship, faith, organizing, and the routines that create belonging across generations. We're interested in work that expands the stories we tell about rural life, not by flattening it into nostalgia or stereotype, but by revealing its complexity, contradictions, and possibilities.

Not every practice deserves to be preserved. Some are habits we inherit without choosing; others are patterns of harm, addiction, or silence that we're working to break. We welcome work that explores both what we carry forward and what we leave behind.

Above all, we're looking for writing that understands practice as an ongoing relationship, with ourselves, our communities, our histories, and our futures.

Who Can Submit

We welcome writers of all experience levels with a meaningful connection to rural places or communities.

We especially encourage submissions from writers in historically underrepresented rural communities, including working-class, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, immigrant, and disabled writers.

What We Accept

• Poetry

• Fiction

• Creative nonfiction

• Hybrid work

• No visual art

• No AI-generated or AI-assisted writing

Submission Guidelines

• Theme: Practice

• Submit up to three pieces

• Maximum 1,200 words per piece

• Work should engage with themes of practice, repetition, care, labor, survival, devotion, learning, repair, maintenance, community, or unlearning.

• Previously published work will be considered. If a submitted piece has appeared elsewhere, please note its publication history in your submission.

• Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Fees & Rights

• No submission fee

• Contributors receive one complimentary copy of the anthology.

• Contributors retain copyright to their work.

• At this time, we are unable to offer monetary compensation.

Submit Your Work

Submissions are open from July 1 through July 31, 2026.