Bring out your dead.

Hauntings Welcome

We do not operate on a ‘call for papers’ basis. Instead, we run an ongoing ‘call for exorcisms’. No deadlines.

Here is what we are not. We are not a dumping ground for work that you couldn’t get published anywhere else. We’re not an archive of ephemera or a repository of rejects. We’re a curated collection of ideas you couldn’t get published elsewhere, but that still haunt you. Ideas you feel are so important that you are possessed by rage that they couldn’t find a home. If you just want the Google Scholar record, that’s what SSRN and Arxiv are for. This is something different, although no more prestigious in real terms. This is not about laying work to rest, but about finding a meaningful home for work you can’t bear to simply abandon.

If you have something like that, then we’d be interested to hear about it. But we’re not a journal. We don’t operate peer review or offer substantive critique. All submissions to our call for exorcism go an informal panel known as the Hauntorage. If it finds a champion, just one, then we’ll accept it. If it doesn’t – we won’t. Don’t take a no to heart – rejection is as much about the delivery as the message. What it means is your passion didn’t burn brightly enough to catch someone else on fire.

If you still feel the fires burning, well – try again. The gates to the Haunted Playground are always unlocked. What use is a key in a world of ghosts?

Submission Criteria

Anonymise your submission. Or don’t. Your call. We intend to say yes to people as much as we do to papers. Submit in any format – we do have a house style for accepted epigrams but we can worry about that after you get the ‘yes’. Word counts – as much as you need, but maybe not quite as much as you want. We like work to luxuriate in language, but scholarly discipline is also appreciated. We admire rhetoric and the craft of presentation, but that’s not a substitute for rigour – your claims must always be proportional to your evidence.

More than anything else, you need to be giving us something that speaks to your passion, that says something unsaid that needs to be said. You won’t get critique or reviewer feedback – that’s not what we do. You need to be confident that the haunting is evident. Our first principle is that your work must be obviously good. if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter what our other principles may be.

We’ll get back to you with a yes or a no. If it’s a yes, we may suggest some reworking but in the end it’ll be up to you to decide how much you want to do. You’ll get access to the Overleaf template for the epigrams – fill it in, send it on, and we’ll do the rest. We’re indexed in Google Scholar and Orcid, and we have our own ISSN.