We are currently OPEN for submissions!
Thank you for your interest in submitting to Disabled in Nature! Please read this guide prior to submitting. When you are ready, you can find the button to submit your work at the bottom of the page.
The goal of this project is to position disabled people’s experiences as a source of knowledge and insight about what it means to be human, particularly in relationship to the natural world – rather than as problems to be fixed.
We want the experiences, nonfiction stories, and perspectives of disabled people regardless of whether they consider themselves a nature enthusiast or not! We are interested in how a wide variety of disabled people connect to the natural world, both in big and in small, everyday ways.
Notes About Submitting
- Any disabled person in the US and abroad can submit.
- We do not gatekeep the definition of disability and accept self-diagnosis and those without diagnoses. Whether you identify as disabled, chronically ill, Mad/mentally ill, neurodivergent, or something else, we encourage you to submit.
- We pay accepted contributors $0.10/word up to 500 words for written work, or $50 for art and multiple photo submissions with artist statements and image descriptions for visual work.
- Submission deadline is rolling until we accept our target number of contributors for this cycle.
- You can submit anonymously or with a pseudonym, no questions asked.
- We will collaborate with the contributors of successful submissions to ensure they meet our guidelines before publishing. Approved submissions will appear on our website!
What We Want
First-person written work, photographs, poetry, and artwork centered around your experiences being in and connecting to nature. Your work does not have to explicitly mention disability, nor do you have to think of yourself as an “outdoorsy” person to submit.
“Nature” can also mean many different things. Though some may only think of national parks or spaces that are “out there,” what counts as “nature” can also be found a lot closer to home. We are just as interested in your work about encountering nature from your home, your front steps, a city street, or a parking lot as we are in work that take place in parks or remote settings. Questioning what counts as “nature” and how we can connect to it is at the heart of this project – so we encourage submissions that give us new perspectives on what “nature” can mean!
Examples could be (but are not limited to):
- An essay about a particularly impactful nature experience
- A photo journal of plants and animals you’ve seen around your neighborhood
- Artwork you created while in nature or in reflection about nature
- Written reflections about the relationship between your disability and your experiences in nature
- Music you have created in relationship with nature/with nature in mind.
Please submit all images with appropriate alt-text descriptions. To learn more about how to write alt-text, you can visit this page.
What We Don’t Want
- Submissions by nondisabled family members, friends, educators, etc about a disabled person they know.
- Stories or narratives of “overcoming” disability or “supercrip” narratives about succeeding “in spite of” disability
- Submissions that disclose personal information that may cause harm to yourself or others.
- Submissions that include:
- graphic or violent content
- content or language that is harmful or offensive to people of any marginalized group, including ableist, racist, transphobic, misogynistic, audist, fatphobic, Islamophobic, etc. language or content
- plagiarized or AI-generated work
We reserve the right to not publish anything that violates these guidelines or is otherwise deemed harmful and/or inappropriate to the goal of the site.