"Read the journal." This is always the best advice for learning what any venue is likely to publish. Since we're new, you don't have to feel guilty about not reading us up-front, but you will need to read this site more carefully.
What's in the name? Take your first cue from our name. Absorb the several definitions offered on our home page, and you'll get a sense of what we're intending.
Circuitous routes, winding ways. We want to be taken places that our reality-T.V.-worshipping, tightly-boxed-genre-publishing, attention-deficient, imagination-disabled culture rarely goes. This includes good old-fashioned Bradbury-esque* storytelling, as well as everything from nonfiction with subtle inexplicable elements to full-out literary fantasy.
Uplifting. It is the belief of the Windlass staff that the world contains quite enough ugliness, and rather more than enough people who seem to take satisfaction in heaping more onto the burgeoning landfill of our culture's nastiness. We agree with Aristotle and John Gardner that it is the duty of the artist to add beauty to the world; to strive ever and always to uplift the human condition.
Unrelentingly bleak stories can have great uplifting value when cast as cautionary tales, and we would be very pleased to see more examples of excellence in this vein. However, dark stories whose only raison d'etre is to illustrate how horrid and hopeless is life will not find a home in Windlass.
*The staff of Windlass holds Ray Bradbury's work as the benchmark to which short speculative fiction may aspire. If you have not read his wondrous work, what are you doing here? Go directly to your favorite book store and pick up Fahrenheit 451 and The October Country (to get you started).