Firewords is the magazine of fiery fiction & poetry brought to life with visual flair. Campfire is our digital serialised offshoot that drops regular bitesized content into your inbox. Every fortnight, come get cosy with us while we toast some marshmallows and tell stories into the night. Each piece will be accompanied by the ‘usual’ amazing, unique and colourful illustrations.
We’ve had our sights on expanding Firewords to publish novels as well as the magazine for a long time. There’s a lot of overlap in the world of book and magazine publishing – printing, distribution, stockists etc. and we have obviously met 100s of talented writers over the years! We’ll be starting slowly with Jen’s (publishing as JJ Scott) debut novel, The Making of Maggie Munroe, and seeing where to go from there.
Set in wartime Glasgow, Scotland, and inspired by stories from JJ’s childhood told to her by her gran, including the revelation that her gran had been proposed to by four different men (talk about a plot twist!), we’re excited to bring the story of Maggie Munroe to the world.
We’ll have more details soon so watch this space.
We wanted something special for the cover of our 10th issue (copies still available here) and with the theme of ‘Curiosity’ we know Guillermo Ortego was the man for the job. We’ve worked with Guillermo on several illustrations for Firewords in the past and we were always impressed by the care he puts into his conceptual thinking as well as his craft. The amazing wraparound cover he created for Issue 10 is below and in this guest post he shares some of the details you may have missed…
FJ Morris is the author of ‘In a Small Pond’, a short story we published in Issue 6 of Firewords. Since then, she has published a brilliant collection of her own and in this article she shares some thoughts on how she managed to succeed.
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In November last year, my collection ‘This is (not about) David Bowie’ was released into the big-wide-world of books. There are so many inspired ways to put together a collection, but just for the record, here’s mine…
With Issue 10 being a big milestone for us, we took the opportunity to look back at the Firewords story so far. We've done the maths and totalled up a few fun stats of our 10 issues...
We've collaborated with 129 artists, illustrators, photographers and hand-letterers. All have been unique, talented and a joy to work with.
We've had the huge pleasure of being able to publish 200 writers over the years (and some multiple times!) It means so much that they all chose Firewords as a home for their work and the magazine wouldn't exist without them.
Working out the exact number of submissions is hard as many include several pieces (especially with poetry) but 5500+ submissions is a close estimate! It's hard to believe we've read so many stories and poems over the years. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to send some work our way.
We read submissions blind so gender isn't a consideration when choosing what to publish but we were happy to calculate that we've published a fairly balanced split so far with 55% female and 45% male. (These stats don’t include those who identify as neither male or female or those who didn’t state their gender when submitting) Publishing a diverse mix of voices is so important to us.
We love the global nature of this project and feel very honoured to have received submissions from 89 countries around the world 🌎
Thank you to everyone who has helped us reach this milestone and here’s to many more to come.
We will soon be opening submissions for Issue 11 (Wednesday 19th December), so if you’d like to be part of the story going forwards, why not send something our way?
