Welcome to Velvet Grey
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Literature from goth girls, gays, and goddesses
Velvet Grey was born out of a desire to share poetry, flash fiction, and short creative non-fiction written by and for girls that collect spiders, gays that dance in graveyards and goddesses whose shine reflects from the moonlight. Players of madness, siren singers, and night sky watchers are welcome here.
What We’re Looking For
Lovelorn stories of black lace and brooding hearts, poems about centipedes dedicated to the old gods, true stories about black lipstick and parking lot philosophy.
We are looking for fiction between 500-2000 words, but if you have something you think might shiver our bones, submit it. We don’t want fanfiction and tend to be into things that are more macabre, creepy, sinister, sexy, and heartbreaking than fantastical or magical. We’re not opposed to the later, but it’s a much harder sell.
We also want your creative non-fiction, liteary, and music criticism. These should also be about 500-2000 words. If there’s a great album (new or old) you’ve always wanted to write about send it our way. Got a story about drinking with Murder By Death in a graveyard (I do) and want to connect it to the joy of meaninglessness, we want to read it. Ever wonder about the goths that roam during the day on your drive home from work? Please send us your story.
For poetry, dude we just want to have our hearts broken. Black nights, endless oceans, shriveled pedals, the contemplation of death while looking at skulls, Chicana goth girls smoking cigarettes, black metal boys in the forest fighting against fascists. You know that crazy romance shit that makes us cry or want to sit in an open field contemplating meaninglessness.
We’ll take art. We’re pretty picky about art to be honest. We like skulls of all sorts, pictures with cats in them, striking images of bad ass babes, hot dudes with ripples (think Tom of Finland but at a Nine Inch Nails concert), and definitely dark drawings of the old gods and goddesses, but like Medusa and Hel, not Athena or those other shitty gods. If it will make a butch woman horny and openly blush, send it to us. Nothing gratuitous and focused on genitals though. Porn is cool and all, but that’s not what this is about.
Velvet Grey is not on that racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or xenophobic bullshit, nor do we want to read that whack ass shit that promotes Zionism, white supremacy, or MAGA. Grow up with your bullshit if that’s what you’re into. Art isn’t for you.
If you’d like to submit go to our Subfolio page to see when we are open and for more details.
How We Operate.
Velvet Grey publishes on an irregular basis with rolling submissions. We post singular works when we find something we love and artists we connect with. We are a mystery of the night. All submissions are accepted through Subfolio only. Work emailed to us will not be read. We post on our Instagram when new work is published. Submissions open and close at our will.
Velvet Grey is kind of being forced at the moment to take submission fees to pay Subfolio but is otherwise free (we get like 100 free submissions so get in early). We are entirely volunteer run doing it for the love of the game and as such, we can not afford to pay people right now. We think? Maybe we will if we make enough in submission fees over the cost of hosting this submission portal. Which sucks, because as a writer we believe that creating poetry and stories is work and under capitalism people should be paid for their labor. But until we figure out how to get some grants, decide to sell some merch (don’t hold your breath), or do other activities to generate income, we’re doing it for the love.
Currently we are open to simultaneous submissions. Please let us know if your piece is excepted elsewhere. We have an FNASR and WILL publish work if it’s been on your blog or Instagram, but we don’t want work that’s been published elsewhere unless the journal of origin is defunct.
Velvet Grey is currently the bastard child of m.e. gamlem, a queer, anarchist writer whose work can be found. They were reading so many great poems of darkness at another literary journal they work at and wanted to create a simple space for the witchy girls, the magical gays, and eternal beauties of the night.
We do not want nor willingly publish generative AI work. If you see something you think sucks in that regard, let us know. We do our best not to get got by the water sucking machines, but keep in mind the use of “we” is the royal sense. Currently, Velvet Grey is maintained by just one person and they are queer and tired.
FNASR
By agreeing to let us publish their work, authors and artists are agreeing to grant Velvet Grey first serial rights to the work. Upon publication, all other rights revert back to the author and remain exclusively the authors, and we ask only that if the work should be reprinted in an anthology or collection, or is republished electronically, that Velvet Grey is credited as its original publication.
We have grand designs of perhaps publishing an anthology one day and upon acceptance allow us to publish in that anthology if so selected. We’ll contact you if that’s the case so we don’t fuck anything up for you when you get that sweet deal from one of the Big 5 or a cherry indie.
