Submit

Thanks for your interest in MER! We publish creative work on mothers, mothering, and motherhood, in all its forms. You need not be a mother to submit, as long as your piece is focused on motherhood.

Short Call for Literary Submissions Opens 12/1/25

Short Call for Poetry and Hybrid Submissions: The (Re)Birthing Room
MER Online Folio Curated by Karolina Zapal

“The (Re)Birthing Room,” seeks poetry (up to three poems in one document) and hybrid works (of 750 words or fewer) exploring pregnancy, birth, and rebirth—the physical, emotional, and metaphorical spaces where new life, new selves, and new worlds emerge, for an MER Online Folio.  Open for submissions Dec. 1 through 15, 2025.

The birthing room is a liminal space where transformation happens, sometimes quietly, sometimes violently, sometimes both. When I gave birth to my daughter this past January, I entered such a room: hospital-white, filled with my husband, nurses, a midwife, a doula. There, I experienced joy and fear, a postpartum hemorrhage, and a retained placenta. That room changed me in ways I both imagined and never could have imagined.

This folio invites work that considers birth and rebirth in their many forms, from the physical and emotional experiences of pregnancy and delivery to broader acts of becoming. Perspectives from new parents, nurses, midwives, doulas, and medical staff are welcome, as are reflections on loss, transformation, and emergence in all their manifestations: ecological, spiritual, creative, political, or cultural.

The birthing room might be a hospital or a home, a forest or a protest site, a body or a dream. It might be the earth in spring, a nation reimagined, or a self remade. Is the birthing room a location in the world, or something carried within us? What might a birthing room look like for the environment, for a government, for a self remade?

As the title suggests, The (Re)Birthing Room is open to multiple interpretations. The parenthetical “re” signals the cyclical nature of transformation: to give birth is also to be reborn.–Karolina Zapal

SUBMISSION LINK COMING 12/1/25

Call for Visual Art Submissions (ends 12/1/25).

Seeking visual art submissions on the theme of “Mothers and Families” for publication in print and online.

SUBMIT VISUAL ART HERE