Some Conflicts are Realer Than Others: Lit Mags Seeking War-Related Writing

By Becky Tuch

From Tim O'Brien to Graham Greene to Ernest Hemingway to Jenna Blum to Norman Mailer, countless writers have written about war, their own personal experiences as well as fictionalized ones. If you have your own war story to tell, be it fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, here are some lit mags that might be suitable:

COMBAT. This quarterly literary magazine is published as a venue for worthy artistic expressions about war. This topic, what war has wrought and how its echoes persist, is widely avoided for innumerable poor excuses and too few good reasons. By shunning this subject, war has become unspeakable without becoming unthinkable, and therefore remains still quite doable. And, the people with legitimate experiences have very few opportunities to share their hard-won insights. This magazine is where those voices will be heard, where those visions will be portrayed, where those hearts and minds can communicate.

CONSEQUENCE is an independent, international literary magazine. We publish annually short fiction, poetry, non-fiction, interviews, visual art, and reviews primarily focused on the culture of war and social injustice. (Read our interview with editor George Kovach here.)

DEADLY WRITERS PATROL. The mission of the Deadly Writers Patrol magazine is to provide a forum for writings that originate from the Vietnam experience and to encourage greater understanding of the changes wrought by the Vietnam era. We are particularly interested in writing by Vietnam veterans,but our pages are open to anyone concerned with how the Vietnam era shaped the world in which we live. We are interested in writing that looks both outward and inward,grappling with what we were,what we became,and what we might be if we deal honestly with the things we’ve ignored.

GRENADE MAGAZINE is an online literary magazine featuring literature and multi-media created by miliary personnel and their families. 

O-DARK-THIRTY is the journal for the Veterans Writing Project. One of the tenets upon which we built the Veterans Writing Project is the idea that every veteran has a story. This site is where those stories get told. Sure, there are other places to hear or read the stories: around the bar, on a road trip, in some other journal. But like the man says, “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” This is our journal. It was conceived by and designed for, is run by, features work written by, and provides voice to members of the military community.

WARSCAPES. Since 2011, Warscapes has had the honor of publishing great work from some 40 hot and cold conflicts worldwide. We would like to thank all of our fantastic writers, photographers and artists...and most of all our readers – from some 180 countries – who have come to Warscapes over and over for our in-depth exploration of current conflicts through the diverse lenses of literature, reportage, art, photography, book & film reviews, op-eds and our retrospectives on special topics...We have been moved and humbled by the genuine faith among all those involved in the communal and collaborative effort to bring evocative, political and often arresting work that does not find space in mainstream media. 

WAR, LITERATURE AND THE ARTS. From time immemorial, war and art have reflected one another, and it is this intersection of war and art that WLA seeks to illuminate. If it seems to fall to the historian to make distinctions among wars, each war’s larger means and ends, the trajectory for the artist, regardless of culture or time, seems to fall towards an individual’s disillusionment, the means and ends of war played out in the personal. For the individual soldier, the sweeping facts of history are accurately written not in the omniscient, third-person plural, but in the singular first. We live in a culture that values the individual. Our works of art about war mirror this welcome bias.

Becky Tuch is the founding editor of The Review Review.

Photo credit: ViaMoi / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND