Culture
MAYDAY Culture wants your reviews, essays, and interviews about literature, cinema, television, music, video games, fashion, theater, photography, art, and architecture! We want pieces from writers with vision who are capable of critically assessing art in interesting and novel ways. We want work that puts art in conversation with other works and with our world. We want arts criticism with a strong voice that surprises us.
Generally, our Culture output exists somewhere between formal academic essays and informal magazine reviews. We are bound by the two-month publication cycle (and a lengthy editing period), so please don’t pitch any festival coverage, time-sensitive interviews, or reviews of hot new releases. Instead, we want to hear about your passions and fixations, whether it’s a feminist analysis of the COVID athleisure trend or a review of a specific 1970s Italian horror film, an essay about the work of photographer Ansel Adams or an interview with an interesting local artist from your hometown. We don’t really care about eyebrows here — we don’t subscribe to ideas of the high-brow or low-brow. Submit whatever makes you happy and whatever you can write about confidently and intelligently.
Minimum length is around 600 words. Maximum length is around 6,000. Please send only one Culture submission at a time. All Culture submissions will be edited before publication. In submitting, you agree that, if your piece should be accepted, the editors will revise your work before it will be published.
MAYDAY pays $20 per article. Payment issued shortly after publication.
We welcome pitches by email, too. Review our editors’ statements below, and feel free to pitch to us via email.
Clement Obropta is interested in pitches for enthusiastic and incisive arts criticism and theory, especially focusing on film, television, video games, and music.
Lisa Ströhm Winberg is interested in pitches that center around visual art, semiotics in design, and fashion as an art form. Lisa is especially interested in pitches about fashion theories and visual analysis of photography.