Submit

Westerly is published twice a year in June and November. Submission windows will open for each issue as per the advertised dates. A specific Call for Submissions will be disseminated for all Special Issues (both online and in print). Submission to these issues will be according to the specific criteria set.

Please submit your work online. A link to our creative submissions portal (via Submittable) will appear at the bottom of this page while submissions are open. Scholarly articles may be submitted at any time.

• Manuscripts and poems for submission should be 1.5-spaced and typed in Times New Roman font size 12, with margins no more than 2.5cm. You must ensure that all titles, headings and textual breaks are clearly marked. All pages should include the title.
• Please do not include any identifying material or cover page on the submission document as uploaded. Westerly reads work in assessment under deidentified review. Please ensure your submission document does not compromise this.
• The submission form in Submittable will include space for a cover letter. This should include the name, postal address and a short bio of the author, as well as any information you feel is critical to our assessment of the piece.
• If you are submitting an essay with citations (in any form), please ensure that it adheres to the Westerly style guide and requirements for referencing (see below).
• No more than five poems (maximum 50 lines each) or one short story should be submitted at any one time. You should wait for a response before submitting future work for consideration.
• While every care is taken with manuscripts submitted by post, the editors can take no final responsibility for their return. Contributors are consequently urged to retain copies of all work submitted this way.

When submitting online please collate poems/material into a single document or file. (Submissions including images should also upload the images themselves as single image files.) If you cannot submit your work online, please submit by post to: Westerly Centre (M204), The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy., Crawley WA 6009, Australia. Postal submissions should include a covering letter which includes a brief, two-line biographical note and email address for correspondence. Please note that manuscripts will not be returned.

We are bound by policy to pay the minimum set fees for all work published. Payment rates are:

• Print work:
  • Poems: $250 for one poem or $300 for a poetic sequence
  • Prose (including scholarly work): $500
  • Visual art/photo essays/comics: $620

• Online Publication (including reviews): $250
• Online Publication (Online Special Issue): as per print

We aspire to pay writers Australian Society of Authors (ASA) rates when possible, depending on Westerly’s funding. We encourage our contributing authors to be subscribers of the journal, and support the publication which is supporting them! For this reason, we will offer any authors selected for publication who are not subscribers the option to take out a discounted year’s subscription as part-payment for their work. 

General

• Work should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration elsewhere. Prior publication will make the work ineligible for any consideration.
• In submitting, you are declaring the work attached as original, and entirely of your own production. You will retain copyright over your work if published.
• Westerly follows the current edition of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook, using parenthetical documentation and a list of works cited.
• Westerly uses endnotes, not footnotes. Endnotes should be used only where absolutely necessary.
• Single inverted commas are used.
• The name and contact details of the author, including postal address, should be included in the relevant space within the submission portal. The title of the work should appear on every page of the document. Please do not include any identifying information on the submission document.
• Contributions should be saved as a Word file or a .pdf file.

Style Resources

Westerly uses Australian English spelling, referring to the Macquarie Dictionary (Macq.), and secondarily to the Australian Oxford Dictionary (AOD, 2nd edition). The Style Manual (SM) is consulted in style choices.

Paragraphing

New paragraphs are denoted by indenting the first line. Do not insert line spaces between paragraphs.

Spelling

Use:

• ‘ise’ rather than ‘ize’
• ‘focuses’ rather than ‘focusses’
• ‘enquiry’ is to be used in the general sense of ‘asking’, while ‘inquiry’ should be used to be mean a formal investigation

Retain the mute ‘e’ in ‘judgement’ and ‘acknowledgement’. See the Westerly Spelling Variation Sheet for an alphabetical listing of individual words.

Capitalisation

Use:

• Maximal capitalisation for headings of prose
• Maximal capitalisation for titles of publications, apart from titles of magazine and newspaper articles, which take minimal capitalisation
• All subtitles introduced by colon
• All subtitles minimal capitalisation
• When a quotation is introduced in the body of the text, the quotation can be changed to lowercase or capitalised depending on the structure of the sentence. However, capitalisation and lowercase should be kept as per original text when the quotation is set as a block quotation, or when included in a title.
• Capitalise qualifications and job titles in bio, e.g. BA Honours in Anthropology; a Senior Lecturer

Punctuation

Use:

• Quotation marks: single for dialogue, double for dialogue within dialogue (adjust in quotations for Westerly style)
• Single quotation marks for song titles, story titles, etc.
• Punctuation inside quotation marks for dialogue, but outside for other instances. (Reported speech: punctuation outside quotation marks.)
• Em dash unspaced (also to be applied in quotations)
• Em dash to signify abrupt break, no full stop if the end of a sentence
• Hyphenation as per Macq. (‘postcolonial’/‘post-colonial’: author choice)
• Unspaced ellipsis. Representations:
  • indicating material removed from within quotation: ellipsis points in square brackets, space before and after brackets (‘ […] ’); in omissions of more than one sentence, include relevant punctuation before the ellipsis (e.g. ‘. […] ’ or ‘, […] ’)
  • indicating speech trailing off, etc.: no space before, space after ellipsis points (‘… ’)
• Block quotations: citation falls after full stop
• Place superscripts (e.g. notes) before all punctuation
• In quoting poetry, insert thin space on either side of solidus

Italics

• Italicise book titles, journals and film titles
• Italicise foreign terms, unless in common usage (used at author’s discretion, esp. in poetry)

Numbers

• Spell out 1–99 in descriptive text
• Spell out ages (e.g. in his seventies, eighteen years old, forty-fourth birthday)
• Spell out per cent (use symbols in tables or in parentheses)
• 1,000; 10,000; 1,000,000
• Currency: $10, A$55, $5,000, two-dollar coin, seventy-three cents

Time and Date

Use:

• 30 April 1989, December 31st, the first of May, 14th October
• 17th century (hyphenated when adjectival), 4th century BC (use numbers where adjectival)
• 1920s, the ’60s
• four in the morning, six o’clock, ten past seven, eight-fifteen, 6pm, 4.31am

Style Preferences

Use:

• Cultural markers as per author preference
• Colloquialisms and vernacular as per author preference
• Dr, Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms
• No ‘s’ after the apostrophe signalling possession in names ending in ‘s’: Denise Jones’ horse
• Five months’ pregnant
• Spacing between name initials, e.g. T. S. Eliot
• Prime minister in lowercase if not incumbent
• US, USA, UK
• pre–World War II
• capitalise organisations and titles in direct reference/address (the World Health Organisation, the Indian Army) but use lower-case for any generic references (several local health organisations, an army recruit)

In scholarly articles, the use of abbreviated titles should be avoided. Those in common usage (such as ABC, ACTU, ALP) are allowed (no stops). Lengthy titles can be reduced to a shortened form (whole words) after the first reference. The names of States (Victoria, South Australia, and so on) should not be shortened.

Illustrations

If an illustration is to be used it should be scanned to a resolution of at least 300dpi at reproduction size and numbered (for example, ‘author’s name, no 3’). It should be sent as a separate file. The place where the illustration is to be inserted in the body of the article should be marked, with the caption immediately following. If the illustrations are not scanned, you should send the original numbered in a similar way

Referencing

Westerly uses a version of MLA in-text citations (author page), with a short title to distinguish multiple works. Please follow the basic style outlined below for all referencing.

Referencing examples

For further information, refer to:

• MLA citation style (University of Western Australia)
• OWL MLA in-text citations (Purdue University)
• MLA Handbook (9th edition)

Note differences in style as in the examples above.

Works Cited: Changes to MLA referencing as per examples above, and:

• Punctuation outside title indicators
• Capitalisation as per original text when including other works within title
• For two or more books by the same author, list works by date, recent to old. (Ignore articles like A, An, and The.) Provide the author’s name in last name, first name format for the first entry only. Following entries, author indicated by ‘––.’

In-Text Citations:

• Author (surname) & Page format
• No page: np
• Multiple works by same author, include abbreviated title
• Multiple works by same author in one citation, order by year, recent to oldest
• Multiple authors in one citation, order alphabetically
• Three or more authors from one source, include only first author and ‘et al.’