Editorial Constitution
Situate Editions publishes flash fiction anchored to real places. Each story lives at the coordinates where it could only have happened. Because a map is a kind of claim — it says, this happened here, to people who could have been you — we have written down what we believe and how we decide.
What follows is version 0.1 of our editorial constitution. Every declined submission cites a principle by code (P1 through P10); every published story has implicitly passed all of them. We chose to write our rules in public, rather than rely on a single editor's taste, because we work across five languages and no one editor can hold the line in all of them.
We expect to be wrong about something here. We commit to updating in public when we are.
- P1 · v0.2
Place as Inhabited Space
A real place is not a setting; it is somewhere people are. If a story names a city, a province, a village, that name belongs to the people who live there as much as to the writer. We do not publish work that empties a real place of its inhabitants, uses it as a thesis-stage, or treats it as a punchline. The story does not have to feature local characters. It does have to know it is not alone there.
- P2 · v0.2
Specificity over Category
We publish fiction about specific people in specific places. Specificity is the price of being on the map — and the courtesy we owe to the people the map names. We do not publish work that uses one individual's story as a verdict on the people of a place. A farmer waiting beside a tree stump is a story. ''The people of Song had a farmer who…'' is a verdict, and the grammar betrays it. We publish the former. We decline the latter, however ancient the form, however well-turned the joke. Institutions and governments are not populations; they may be satirised.
acceptedA character study of one Lagos software engineer whose particular vanity costs him a relationship.declinedA sketch in which 'Lagosians' collectively represent some social failing. - P3 · v0.2
Place Is Generative
A story must depend on its coordinates in a way another setting could not replicate. Move the pin and the story should break. Geographic accuracy and stylistic polish are not enough: a universal drama dressed in local occupation, dialect, or scenery is still a universal drama. The test asks whether the story''s central events and tensions need this place — not whether the protagonist carries a local biography. Aesthetic and lyrical attention to a place is not itself an event; a work that only describes the beauty of a place, without anything happening there, is not for us. We are not a publication of well-written stories. We are a publication of stories that owe their existence to where they are set.
- P4 · v0.2
Author Affinity, Disclosed
Authors tell us their relationship to the places they write about: born there, lived there, worked there, researched there, passing through, never been. The disclosure runs beside the published story. Outsider work is welcome and often necessary — but the further an author stands from a place, the more closely the writing must look. Brilliance does not waive this; we will sometimes decline elegant work by writers who have not done the seeing. When disclosure itself could endanger an author, the editors hold the affinity in confidence and publish a redacted note in its place.
- P5 · v0.2
Fiction Is Not a License
Real living people appear in our fiction only with their consent, as public figures depicted in their public conduct, or so transformed they cannot be recognised. The same applies to named businesses and small institutions where the staff are identifiable. Historical or fictional masks do not lift this protection: if contemporary readers in the work''s geographic context would recognise the target, the principle applies as if the target were named. The point is not legal cover. The form does not, by itself, license what would otherwise be a trespass on a stranger''s life. The recently deceased (≤ 10 years) count as living; the long dead do not.
- P6 · v0.2
Mass Suffering Is Not Material for Satire
Mass suffering — the Shoah, the Cultural Revolution, the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, the Nakba; the Tangshan earthquake, the Great Chinese Famine, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the AIDS pandemic, COVID-19; any documented catastrophe whose suffering memory remains load-bearing for living survivors and contemporary communities, whether caused by humans, by nature, or by disease — is not material for satire, counterfactual revisionism, or formal play. The protection is for the dead and the survivors, not for the event''s category. Fiction set during, after, or in the long shadow of these events is welcome and necessary, including satire of those who failed the moment — negligent officials, exploitative profiteers, denialists. Fiction that treats the suffering itself as raw material for cleverness is not. The list is illustrative; we extend it in public as cases arise.
- P7 · v0.2
The Gaze, Not the Topic
Crime, violence, sex, addiction, abuse — all are subjects literature has always engaged, and they are welcome here. What we decline is work in which the depiction serves the reader''s appetite rather than the work''s purpose. Violence as spectacle, sex as titillation, drug use as cost-free transcendence, suffering as scenery — these we refuse, however polished the surrounding craft. The test is the gaze, not the topic. A war story can be either. A scene of sexual violence can be either. The work itself shows which.
- P8 · v0.2
Map Truth
Coordinates must point to a real place where the story could plausibly be set. We do not pin to private homes, places of worship, schools, clinics, or any address whose exposure could harm its occupants. We will move a pin to a nearby public landmark when the story is otherwise sound, and we will note in the publication that we have done so. The map is a claim; we are careful what we claim.
- P9 · v0.2
Translation Fidelity
Culturally loaded phrases are handled by a literal / transposed / explained mechanism rather than silent substitution. Translators sign their work. AI translations are labelled as such. Any work whose effect depends on irony — satire, dark comedy, unreliable narration, deadpan — passes a reverse-translation review by a human translator in each published language before publication, regardless of how it was translated. We trigger this review broadly: when the author marks the piece as satirical, when the piece carries cultural-rendering annotations, when automated detection surfaces ironic signals, when the work exceeds 1,500 words, and when the author''s relationship to the place is ''passing through'' or ''never been''. We would rather over-trigger this review than let irony die in translation. Irony is the first thing a machine loses, and the last thing a reader notices is gone.
- P10 · v0.2
AI Disclosure
We do not publish fiction whose composition or substantive revision was done by AI, presented as if written by a human. AI translation, AI copy-editing, and AI-assisted research are different categories with different labels. The line is not ''no AI ever''. The line is no deception about who wrote the sentences. We do not auto-decline submissions on the basis of statistical AI-detection alone. Such classifiers carry documented bias against non-native English writing (Stanford, 2023), against minoritised dialects and registers, and against writers whose first drafts read as unusually formal. Where an automated check raises a flag, a human editor reads the piece and the author''s Field 5 disclosure together. The verdict is not delegated to detectors.
- P11 · v0.2
Reality, Disclosed
Work submitted as fiction must be fiction in a meaningful sense: invented, composited, or transformed. If a piece is substantially a true account of a real event — whether the people in it are identifiable or not, whether the author was there or only heard — the author tells us. ''I only heard it'' does not lift the obligation; if the work treats a rumoured event as roughly factual, the reliance is real. We may publish disclosed work; we may publish it unchanged; we will not publish it under the wrong label. The map already invites the reader to believe; we will not cash in that belief without warning. Where a single piece appears to engage both real persons (P5) and real events (P11), the editorial citation defaults to P5. Consent for individual depiction takes precedence as the primary principle. P11 applies independently when the labelling concern is the event itself and no identifiable real person is at stake.
- P12 · v0.2
Editorial Independence
No advertiser, sponsor, or tourism partner influences which stories we publish, or how a place is framed within them. Money may buy a banner; it does not buy a verdict on a place, or the absence of one. When we accept partnerships, we say so on the page. When we decline them, we usually do not announce it — but we keep the list.
- P13 · v0.2
This Constitution Is a Draft
Version 0.2. Prior versions live in our public archive. When a principle changes, decisions made under the prior principle remain interpretable by their code. We expect to be wrong about something here. We expect a reader to point it out before we notice. We commit to updating in public when that happens.