Bitter by Small Leaf Press | A Review

Picture: Twitter, @smallleafpress

Gone are the days when smaller publishing opportunities were few and far between. With the rise of social media, a quick search on Twitter will bring you a vast amount of small publishers accepting submissions. However, most of these tend to be online only. Without being pretentious, I have always much preferred physical books to read from as opposed to doing my reading on a screen. I spend enough time looking at screens anyway... I don't need another excuse to do that.

At some point, I stumbled upon Small Leaf Press calling for submissions for Volume 3 of their publication. I have been looking at getting back into writing so I was keen to submit. But, before I submitted I thought I would take a read of what they are already putting out there. So, I ordered both their anthology and their magazine. I much prefer the anthology to the magazine, perhaps as it is themed. But, both are printed very beautifully and are both great publications in themselves.

Last night I finished reading 'Bitter' (the anthology) and after adding it to my GoodReads total for 2021, I decided I would like to review it on here. Firstly, let's start with a bit of info on Small Leaf Press. Small Leaf Press is a black-owned small independent publisher established by Candace Daphne in 2020. The theme for this collection of short stories (issue 2) was 'bittersweet' inspiring the title Bitter.

Each story paid credit to the author and if you go on the Small Leaf Press website you can even find a little bio for each contributor. And I believe each contributor also gets paid for contributing as well. The stories are each separated by a simple but pretty title page for each story stating the name of the story and the name of the person who wrote it.

There was not a story in there that I did not like but three stories stood out the most to me and are definitely my favourites. These were:

-Pedalling for Peaches by Yannick Pas

-Small Change by Katie Veitch

-Arid by Emma Urbanova

It is clear that Candace and her team take a lot of care over the submissions. Despite all being given the same prompt, no two stories explored the same themes. Each author interpreted their prompts in different ways. The publication is definitely worth the £7.99 retail price (but you can save a little bit if you purchase the anthology and the magazine as a bundle).

I did not end up submitting my work to Issue 3 of Small Leaf Press in the end, but I did spend a lot of time doing writing: both using the prompt and without out it. I will be keeping an eye on their social media for future submission openings.