Creative Kiosk Submission Guidelines
The military is in some sense a cultural enclave that tends to promote different social perspectives on many issues that may differ somewhat from civilian perspectives due to different life-style experiences. Such experiences tend to produce distinctive cultural expressions by members of the military—especially if stimulated by involvement in actual armed conflict. To capture some of these expressions, Military Review has established the Creative Kiosk to collect and publish a modest selection of such cultural artifacts of possible broader interest to its reading audience and to augment understanding of the historical record of the times when such were collected.
These may include short poems (30 lines), short works of fiction (3,500-5,000 words), photo imagery (dealing with military/security issues), or other related creative items conducive to online publishing that express in some unique way insight into the perspectives that many military members and their family members share.
Prose submissions. Fictional accounts or non-fictional short insight pieces should be well-structured and carefully reviewed to avoid such basic writing flaws as misspelling, poor grammar and usage, and poor use of punctuation marks (unless any of these have been included for some particular stylistic effect). Additionally, although anyone familiar with the military knows that within it stylized profanity has achieved the status of a high art form, the propriety of good manners dictates that the use of profanity and foul language should be tempered if not avoided entirely in prose submissions. Some may criticize this guidance by questioning if it is even possible to avoid pervasive profanity in prose submissions if one of the purposes of the Creative Kiosk is to reflect the actual reality of the military culture. The answer is that skillful authors that truly have something to say won’t fault the need for gratuitous foul language to meaningfully say it.
Poetry submissions. By way of providing a little more in the way of guidance on what one would expect of a poetry submission, the major factors are as follows: first, that the poetry subject addresses something about the military or dealing with related security issues; second, that the submission is an actual poem. That is, poetry submissions need to reflect a good faith effort to employ accepted literary techniques associated with actual poetry including such devices as use of rhyme, meter, allusions, controlling metaphors, irony, etc. Submissions should not be merely meandering streams of consciousness, lists of platitudes, jingoism, foul-language tirades, or other similarly undisciplined and wandering word chains without a point.
Photo imagery. The major factors for submission:
- Related to the military. Images need to be related to the military in some way:
- No personal intrusion. Cannot be the product of an unlawful intrusion into the personal life of another (As an official publication of the U.S. Army, Military Review operates under the regulatory authority of Army public affairs and cannot publish intrusive photo imagery in the same way civilian journalists can).
- Security review at source. Imagery submissions cannot be classified. Images from deployed locations or locations that in some sense may be regarded as classified sites must be reviewed by the appropriate security agent of the member’s unit/organization before submitting (a statement to that effect must accompany each such image).
Biographical sketch required. Each submission should be accompanied by a short biography (25-50 words) of the submitter that provides a description of his/her involvement with the military.
Review and selection of submissions. Submissions will be reviewed in the same way Military Review administers book reviews and Future Warfighting Program submissions. Also, there are no guarantees of publication or notifications back to submitters indicating whether the material will be used at all. Therefore, unlike regular manuscripts, Military Review does not assert a first right of refusal before the author sends his/her submission to other publications for consideration.
Frequency of posting. It is the intention of Military Review to make a new posting to Creative Kiosk at least once weekly.
How to submit. Submissions should be saved in Microsoft Word or some compatible file format and sent via email to: usarmy.leavenworth.tradoc.mbx.armyu-aup-military-review-public@army.mil.