Guide to Literary Magazines

Isotope

A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing

Utah State University

3200 Old Main Hill

Logan, UT 84322-3200

Phone: (435) 797-3697 Fax: (435) 797-3797

E-mail: leslie.brown <at> usu.edu

Simultaneous submissions: yes Email submissions: no Reading period: 7/1-10/15 Payment: yes (see website) Contests: yes (see website) ISSN: 1544-8479 Founded: 2003 Issues per year: 2 Average pages: 52 Sample copy (postpaid): $5 Copy Price: $5 Subscription (Individuals): $15 Subscription (Libraries): $20

Publisher’s Description: We are interested in lyric and short narrative essays, short stories, microfiction, prose poems, poetry and artwork that engages in and meditates on the varied complex relations among the human and non-human worlds, with a special interest in moving beyond merely laudatory descriptions of natural beauty and elegies on loss of the same.

We are interested in “the beauty of things”—to use Robinson Jeffers’s phrase—but seek to complicate typical modes of nature writing with a wider range of emotion and subject.

We are especially interested in work engaging in fields, subjects and concerns that move beyond traditional nature writing—including urban ecosystems, astronomy, physics, chaos theory, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, restoration ecology, earth sciences, cartography, sexuality, medicine and the body.

Recent issues:
Spring/Summer 2009 issue 7.1
Inside this issue, artist and neurobiologist, J. David Sweatt, showcases his brainy canvas, and Lauren Gunderson addresses cosmology and credit in Isotope’s first play "Background." Also featured are the 2009 Editors’ Prize winners: Jaimee Wriston Colbert’s “We Are All in Pieces,” Don Lago’s “The Music of the Spheres,” and Shara Lessley’s “Self-Portrait as (Super/Sub) Pacific. Stephen Trimble closes the issue with a Soliloquy, “Participating in Home: Following Wallace Stegner Into the Heart of the West.”

Fall/Winter 2008 issue 6.2
This issue features Isotope’s first interview, with parasitologist and writer John Janovy Jr., including excerpts from his work. The Portfolio is “The Edge of Sight: The JPL Paintings,” Deb Banerjee’s unique renderings of spacecraft in space. Also included are the winners of Isotope’s 2008 Editors’ Prizes in Nonfiction and Poetry, “Mountain Eros,” animalcules, and stars that are not there, plus poetry, fiction and physicist Robert Davies on the challenges of public climate change education.

Spring/Summer 2008 issue 6.1
The body wanders onto the pages of Isotope through David Kranes’ short fiction, Kate Birch’s nonfiction, and poetry by Kristan LaVietes and Emily Carr. As much as this issue is about the body, it is also about Australia, with featured writers Mark Tredinnick and Alasdair McGregor and photographer Frank Hurley.