COWBOY [kou-boi] (def.)
1. American plains animal herder who tends cows
2. one who is reckless or ignores risk, i.e. "cowboy attitude"
3. tradesman with questionable or atypical practices, i.e. "cowboy plumbing"
4. fast or careless driver on the highway, i.e. "slow down, cowboy"
5. slang for "outlaw"

JAMBOREE [jam-buh-ree] (def.)
1. a large celebration or party, typically boisterous
2. a carousel of noisy merrymaking


If your fiction, creative nonfiction, vignette, flash, or photography merges any combination of the two definitions above, we're probably gonna dig it. Not everything we accept for publication looks the same. That said, words that describe stories we tend to like might include rural, hardscrabbled, rough-hewn, pulpy, noirish, western noir... and, of course, GRITTY.

In short, we're a Grit-Lit magazine focused on the rural working class and revisionist western writing. We are not a traditional western magazine. Western stories we accept tend to stray from archetypes of females as damsels and cowboy gunslingin' heroes. We're generally not interested in historical western characters, no matter how fictionalized. We like nontraditional western stories that, just like the rural grit lit we tend to accept and promote, blend working class and literary language to explore characters and places that find themselves on the hardscrabble rather than heroic side of life.

In other words, our cowboys are more likely to jump off a '71 Maverick than ride into a dusty town on a black steed.