PULP IS ON A PUBLISHING HIATUS UNTIL THIS SUMMER...!

PULP is wending its way through a start-up accelerator and needs some time to evolve and get its ducks in a row.

SOME BACKGROUND ON PULP IN THE MEANTIME:

PULP magazine is an arts + culture publication dedicated to the human body and championing the voices and stories of our most marginalized communities.

When we launched with Medium in August 2019, we had a year’s worth of corporate funding — a monthly editorial budget and part-time salaries for PULP’s founders|editorial team, Katie Tandy and July Westhale — and we paid every single contributor $150-$250.

This past July PULP went entirely indie, launched PULP Public School — our online education arm — and we’re busy as a goddamn swarm of bees applying to grants and fundraising.

This is all to say we’re taking a cue from the venerable and ever-wonderful RUMPUS; each month we will set aside $300. All eligible contributors will be able to opt in for payment at the end of every month and the money will be divided among those who want to be paid. That means payments will average around $75 as we’ll be publishing one essay per week.

We have wrung our hands and hearts around this new reality. PULP believes writing is some of the most important work on the goddamn planet, but making independent media profitable is no small undertaking and until that day comes we don’t want to sacrifice all the amazing stories that have been careening onto our virtual desk.

Know that as editors we are also entirely volunteer, for now. Know that we’re working toward a sustainable future, and that we love you.

Help us keep building this beautiful bodily empire. We can’t wait to read what you’re writing.

About us + what we publish:

Why hello! Thank you for your interest in PULP. We're a multimedia sex, sexuality, and reproductive rights publication celebrating this human coil hurtling through time and space. If you have a body, love a body, or are apt to wonder, just what is this body?, you're just the kind of writers we're looking for.

We love articles, essays, interviews, satire, videos, photographs, illustrations, maybe even a podcast or a video (sorry no poetry or fiction just yet!)—beautifully rendered—that intersect the personal with the universal. 

We’re fascinated by writing that brings narrative to the forefront of current issues, especially if those narratives are not often told or valued in traditional media. 

We also accept proposals for classes for our educational arm, Pulp Public School.

Three points of note: 

+ please, please, please read our submissions guidelines. If you're unclear on what we're looking for, check out our publication for more deets. 

+ we have a small submission fee of $3, because Submittable costs money and we're a small publication. If you really want to submit but can't afford the fee, write to us & we'll work something out.

Overall quandary to ask yourself...

How does this relate to sex—literally—or one’s personal/societal perception of sexuality and/or reproductive rights…?                                      

TOPICS (by no means an exhaustive list):

—Human-body connection

—Menstruation
—Transitioning (if explicitly linked to one’s relationship to sex or desire in the process of doing so, etc.)
— Sexual violence/trauma of the body. (Not simply a harrowing story on abuse, but what said experience did to your perception of/relationship to, sex.)

— Dialogues on gender vis-a-vis the body/desire/sex (Not simply the fraught trappings of femininity/masculinity etc.)
— Asexuality
— Science behind how and why sexual behaviors manifest. (Or don’t.)
— Psychology of kinks
— Memoir/personal essays focused on one’s relationship to sex(uality) and their bodies
— Evolving sexuality or burgeoning sexuality.
— Essays aimed at destigmatizing or exploring less common lifestyles : relationship choices from those actually living them
— Interviews with scientists/ makers/ changers in the sex toy/sex positivity/porn/education/ VR sex industry etc. etc. 

— Sex(uality) and tech // ethically and otherwise
— Histories of little-known or under-explored people, places, movements, and things about (you guessed it!) sex, sexuality, or reproductive rights.