The internet occasionally throws up gems and The Wax Paper is one of them. I stumbled on its call for submissions through the highly useful (and free) online resource The Review Review (99review@gmail.com)
Published as a quarterly broadsheet in Brooklyn and distributed in New York, Chicago and Mankato, The Wax Paper has all the bluff of newspapers before they shrank into tabloids. Eight arm-stretching pages is enough to keep you reading happily for more than an hour. 
So I’m delighted, they accepted two of my short plays for publication in Volume Two (Issue One) alongside some powerful short stories, arresting photography and excellent poems. 
Poets may have a hard time getting published, but playwrights are competing for even fewer print opportunities.
Double bravo therefore to The Wax Paper for giving over an entire page to my two dramas. Lost Property has been performed a number of times, most recently at The Lost Theatre’s Five Minute Play Festival (see photo to the right with actors David Bevan and Maria Askew). 
Bathroom Secrets is a 10 minute play, most recently performed at Unheard, a Festival run by Goblin Baby Theatre Co. at The Bread & Roses Theatre in Clapham. 
On the left you can see actors Susan Hodgetts and Mark Lisseman in full flow as a married couple who can’t communicate.
Both plays are available to read on my website: www.bookerplays.co.uk
This issue of The Wax Paper contains poetry by the flamboyantly named Richard King Perkins II, Holly Wren Spaulding, Charles Rafferty, Robbie Gamble, Talal Alyan, Jennie Greensfelder and George Eklund.
Two of the short stories are absolutely knock out: The Gods by Melissa Knox is a fascinating critique of a life under Freudian analysis. The Second to Last Supper by Sabrina Harris, is a brilliantly satirical attack on capital punishment using the absurd (and I believe legally correct) premise that a United States prisoner cannot be executed unless they have been given their last meal request in full.
“The first priority of The Wax Paper is to expand our understanding of the people we share the world with,” says Editor Hans Hetrick. “Pieces will be selected on their ability to illuminate the humanity and significance of the subjects that inhabit the work – work that required patient observation, remained steadfast in its empathy and displayed genuine vitality.”
If you have poems, short stories, drama, collected conversations, photographs or artwork you think might belong within these lovely pages, please visit: www.thewaxpaper.com/submissions or email Hans Hetrick at waxsubmissions@gmail.com
bookerplays 
Just wanted to thank you for praising “The Gods,” my piece on the Freudian cult to which my family subscribed–it’s actually memoir, not a story, and part of a memoir I’m trying to market. I seem to have no real platform (expert on parental estrangement? Wrote some psychoanalytic books?) and would love advice, since I can’t see myself inventing the kind of platform agents seem to want. I do feel I can write well. Have queried some 30-odd agents and gotten a few friendly rejections. I also don’t live in the U.S, apparently another problem. Posting under my blog name, The Critical Mom.
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Dear Melissa, I’m not a prose writer and can’t really offer much advice on finding a platform for memoir, other than please do find one, as it really deserves to be read! You could always consider self-publishing and marketing it yourself. That might get you noticed by a publisher. Or consider issuing it as serialised blog. Good luck, whichever way you jump.
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