Caught by the River

Submitting to Caught by the River

11th June 2025

An update on our remit, submissions guidelines and contact details. 


Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, New York :[American Fisheries Society],1885-1896, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library

After almost 20 years of making it up as we go along, we’ve decided it’s high time we demystified the process of submitting unsolicited work for publication on the site. This post will be linked in the sidebar on the right-hand side for easy future access, should you ever need to re-familiarise yourself.

If you would like to send us something for consideration, please take the time to read the below first:

We love receiving work out of the blue! Submissions are open year-round, and we read absolutely everything we’re sent. That said, we are a very small team, so please bear in mind that it can take us a little while to respond. For the same reason, we are unfortunately unable to give detailed feedback on submissions.

We are interested in publishing original pieces concerned with arts, nature, culture and landscape. You are welcome to submit essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, visual pieces, audio/field recording based pieces and more: we don’t place many limits on form, though please note that we don’t tend to publish fiction, and that our upper word limit is c. 2000 words.

Our preference is for finished pieces, though pitches are also considered. Please send speculative submissions as an email attachment on a Word or Pages document, along with a few brief words in the email body which summarise the piece. You should also include a brief biographical line you’d be happy to have published with your piece, should it be taken on for publication, along with any links (e.g. social media, website) you’d like included.

Submissions, where possible, should include at least one JPEG image, minimum 1000px wide and 72 dpi (photos taken on phones tend to be plenty big enough). If you did not take or make the images yourself, you should have permission to use them, and include a photo credit in the file name. If you would like images in specific places in the text, please mark with square brackets, e.g. [Image 1 here], with corresponding file names on the JPEG, rather than embedding images in the text.

Please ensure you’re sending your final draft, and that all elements are sent as attachments — links such as WeTransfer often expire before we get to them.

Submissions should be emailed to submissions@caughtbytheriver.net.

Regardless of whether your submission is successful, we will endeavour to get back to you as soon as we can, but appreciate your patience whilst awaiting a response.