Land Almanac
The fields, forests, and valleys of Pennsylvania hold a cultural identity entirely unique. Our heritage is anchored alongside the mountains, the rivers, the plains, and people who shaped the area. We’re rooted deeply in the land and water that shapes us: The Land Almanac exists to explore this heritage in the present, capturing the new culture being forged today through the art, photography, poetry, and stories of the people who live, work, and recreate on this land.
An experiment in capturing local myth-making
We are creating a high-quality, print-first journal anchored in the fields, forests, and waters of the American Midlands. Inspired by the striking visual format of the print magazines and the adventurous, grounded storytelling of 90s Outside Magazine, this is an analog space to reconnect with the physical world around us by learning and exploring the natural world through the eyes of our neighbors.
The Land Almanac is about our shared dirt and watersheds and focuses on practical land relationships, nature-based culture, agriculture, and community stewardship. It’s not all serious thought, we believe a key part of being on the land is playing on it just as hard as we care for it. .
It is not “just” art, a science peer-reviewed journal, or pure editorial journalism, although we intend to edit, produce, and inform from the most educated perspective we can.
We are looking to use science, exploration, and our experiences of nature and land around us to create a unique narrative that helps us feel closer to the land and each other, but does not alienate us from the expansive wonder that is nature.
How Can I get Involved?
As a fledgling project, we have plenty of ways to get involved and are encouraging any and all inquiries to see how we can make this happen.
Call for Submissions: Inaugural Fall Issue Deadline: Earth Day (April 22)
We are looking for volunteer writers, photographers, poets, and artists to help us build our proof-of-concept first issue.
What topics are we looking for? We want stories that explore how we live, work, and recreate on the land.
-
The Outdoors & Recreation: Fly fishing, hunting, trail culture, and local ecology.
-
Agriculture & Subsistence: Backyard homesteading, regenerative farming, and the changing landscape of local agriculture.
-
Culture & Community: Green funerals, local history, DIY/maker ethos, and the intersection of industry and nature.
-
What we aren’t looking for: Hot-button partisan politics. We want pieces that bridge divides through a shared love of the outdoors.
What kind of art do we want?
If it can be printed on high-quality paper, we want to see it.
-
Large-format photography (photo essays, landscapes, grit, and action).
-
Illustrations, block prints, and native plant drawings.
-
Poetry and short-form essays.
For Sponsors & Partners
Fund the First Run We are actively seeking local businesses, newspapers, arts organizations, and outfitters who want to reach a highly engaged, culture-forward audience.
For our inaugural Fall Issue, we are doing a limited, high-quality print run of 150-250 copies.
-
Founding Support Sponsors: Be a part of our proof-of-concept. To ensure the magazine stays visually stunning, Gumption Design Co. will custom-design your advertisement so it beautifully matches the analog, high-end aesthetic of the journal. No ugly clip-art ads here.
-
Title Print Sponsor: We are also looking for a marquee print sponsor to help us cover the physical printing costs of this first run. (Note: A larger, structured ad platform will roll out for Issue #2 once our proof-of-concept is in the wild).
Additonal Information
Written Pieces
Because our themes flow from science and ecological observation, the strongest submissions will have a rooted awareness of the natural systems at work in the place they describe, even if that awareness lives beneath the surface of the prose rather than on top of it.
We publish across two broad editorial worlds:
- Outdoor Adventure: Seasonal trail narratives, river trips, hunting and fishing stories, foraging walks, backcountry experiences. PA-rooted preferred, mid-Atlantic welcome.
- Living with the Land: Homesteading, small-scale farming, food preservation, land stewardship, seasonal rhythms, profiles of growers, makers, and conservationists.
- Place Essays: Lyrical, rooted writing about a specific Pennsylvania landscape, watershed, ridge, or season. Strong ecological grounding and strong sense of place are equally important.
- Science Essays & Field Dispatches: First-person scientific observation, natural history writing, species profiles, ecological field notes. This is the layer from which our themes grow. We actively seek contributors with scientific credentials and field experience.
- Poetry: We publish poetry that emerges from close attention to the natural world. Poetry about this creek, this ridge, this particular October. Poems that carry ecological truth without needing to explain it.
- People & Community: Profiles of guides, conservationists, land stewards, farmers, and anyone doing quiet, important work in this geography.
Word count is flexible and determined case by case. A tight 800-word field note and a 3,500-word narrative essay can both earn a place in the same issue. Let the story be as long as it needs to be and no longer. If you are unsure, just send it on over.
Photography
Photography in The Land Almanac serves two purposes simultaneously: it has to be worth looking at, and it has to be worth keeping. We are a print object. Images should reward close attention on paper, not just a quick scroll.
We welcome photography submitted alongside written pieces as well as standalone photo essays. A photo essay should tell a complete story through images, a river trip, a farm through the seasons, a hunt from pre-dawn to dusk with minimal text required to carry the meaning.
Because our themes flow from the science of a place, photography that carries ecological or documentary weight is especially valued. An image that records a specific habitat condition, a species behavior, a landscape under a particular pressure, these have meaning in the magazine beyond aesthetics. Recordkeeping and beauty are not opposites here.
- Images that place the viewer inside a specific Pennsylvania moment: light, weather, terrain, season
- Work that provides genuine insight into a place, a practice, or a way of being outside
- Documentary honesty: we want the place to show through
- Ecological or natural history content embedded in the image: a photograph that knows what it is looking at
Illustration & Art
We are open to illustration, interpretive visual work, and stand alone drawings that serve the editorial content: field sketches, natural history illustration, maps, and work that extends the meaning of a written piece. We are particularly interested in illustration rooted in observation and experience of being outside: species drawings, habitat diagrams, watershed maps.
Written Submissions
| Format | Details |
| Acceptable | PDF: use this if your piece has any formatting or visual elements that need to be preserved as intended |
| Preferred for Written Content | .docx or .doc (Word): fine for straightforward text submissions |
| Also accepted | .pages, .rtf, or .txt: acceptable but PDF or Word preferred |
| Please avoid | Pasting text into the body of an email: always attach a file |
Include your name, contact email, and a one-sentence bio at the top of your document. If your piece references specific locations, species, data, or institutions, please include a brief source note at the end — this helps our editorial team during fact review.
Photo Submissions
| Spec | Requirement |
| Minimum resolution | 300 PPI or higher: hard requirement for print. Images below 300 PPI cannot be used. If intentionally lower quality, please make a note. |
| File formats | .tif or .jpg preferred. .png accepted. RAW files welcome. |
| Color profile | sRGB or Adobe RGB. We handle color conversion for print. |
| File naming | LastName_Description_001.jpg |
| Captions | Include a caption document: location, date, species or subject identified where relevant |
Send up to 20 images per submission. If your series is larger reach out first. If your files are strong but below 300 PPI, contact us before ruling yourself out: in some cases we can work with what exists, in others we may be able to pair your written piece with complementary photography.