Prism is connected to the University of British Colombia, and has a section devoted to writing prompts.

Tenderness: not weakness, but the place in you that never grew a shell. The wound that chose to stay open.

You can also submit your writing.

Báyò Akómoláfé

https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/the-unbehaving-world/

From a 2024 Nîmes Gazette article: “If proof were needed of the sacred nature of the Fontaine spring and the performance of ritual practices near it well before the time of Augustus, it would be found in the Gallo-Greek inscriptions discovered in the area,” continues Michel Py. One of them mentions a cult to the “Mothers of Nîmes,” and another is considered “an offering to the deities of the Andouonnai springs,” from the Celtic *andeudna, meaning “the waters below.”

n. in philosophy and metaphysics, actuality or realization as opposed to potentiality. Aristotle used the word to refer to the soul (psyche), seen as that form within the material being by virtue of which it achieves the actuality of its nature (see actual). In certain vitalist philosophies and theories, entelechy refers to the vital force within an organism that allows for life, development, and self-fulfillment (see élan vital; vitalism).

I came across this philosophy term today on a wikipedia expedition; I find just thinking about it is mind-bending, in a pleasant way!

From Old English therscold, therscwald — the piece of stone or timber at the bottom of a doorway, over which one steps.

Often debated: thresh, to tread, to beat grain from its husk — suggesting the threshold was literally the place where grain was threshed, or trampled underfoot and separated from the hull.

The second element wald relates to wood, forest, the wild. So embedded in the word is both the domestic and the untamed — the place where the cultivated and the uncontrolled meet.

The Latin equivalent is limen — the threshold stone, the lintel, the sill. From limen we inherit liminal (of or belonging to the threshold), subliminal (below the threshold of consciousness), and eliminate — literally ex limen, to cast beyond the threshold, to put outside the door.

The Roman god Janus was Ianus Liminalis — guardian of the limen, of all doorways, passages, and beginnings. He was invoked before every other god because nothing could begin without first crossing a threshold. His two faces — one looking back, one forward — were not a symbol of indecision but of complete presence at the crossing point, holding both directions simultaneously.

The Indo-European root *ter- carries the sense of crossing over, rubbing through, passing beyond — the same root that gives us through, thorough, trans-, and traverse. To threshold is to pass through by friction, by wearing away, by the slow work of repeated crossing.

It’s early July 1965, and Fred is leaving from Pan Am’s Worldport at JFK. As he approaches the plane, a young woman in a smart pink outfit asks if the photographer next to her can take his photo as he boards the plane. She says they’re from an ad agency doing a campaign for Pan Am. He wishes he’d worn his other suit - this one is wrinkled - but he wants to help out so agrees. She writes down his information on her clipboard, then wishes him a pleasant flight. She seems a little stressed, like it might be her first day of work. She reminds him of his niece Nancy, his brother’s girl out in Oklahoma. He’ll have to send her a postcard from Europe. At least he remembered to have his shoes shined this morning. 

Climbing the stairs, nicely balanced with a matching suitcase in each hand, he’s surprised to find himself moving rather energetically, almost bounding up the metal stairs. Maybe it’s to impress the girl he thinks, laughing to himself. He was at the Pan Am building until the early morning hours, trying to diagnose that bug that’s been plaguing PANAMAC. He finally fixed it at 2AM, and was able to get a little sleep at the hotel. Now he’s heading to Europe for a much needed vacation. What’s the point of earning all that money on the Pan Am support contract if he doesn’t enjoy it? He’s never seen Paris, and he can’t wait. He took advantage of his time on PANAMAC to look up some good French restaurants, they’ve got a bunch of information about their destinations on there. He’s a little nervous about flying, always has been, but the motto cut into the side of the gangway reassures him: World’s Most Experienced Airline. 

Oneiric anemoia — nostalgia for a time or place that never existed and will never exist, triggered for instance by dreaming, where places and scenarios take on an aura of specialness that you then grieve on waking.

lilo

n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up

instantly, as if you’d seen each other last week—which is all the more

remarkable given that certain other people can make every lull in conversation

feel like an eternity.

From lifelong + lie low. Pronounced “lahy-loh.”

The illustration above is from a resource I used to use often but had almost forgotten about, Flickr Commons. Institutions from around the world deposit copyright-free images there, and it is amazing what you can find. commons.flickr.org

The word "excruciating" literally means "out of the cross," referring to the intense anguish of the process.

Yesterday I was remembering Good Friday rituals as a child. The quiet intensity of moving through the Staions of the Cross. We would gather as a small crowd, and shuffle from painting to painting pinned high on the church walls. I remember the ache in my neck from looking upwards, the sniffle of people behind their hankies, the smell of incense, the splash of holy water on my cold skin, the flash of the priest's red vestments. Red the colour of passion, blood, martyrdom.

Good likely comes from God's Friday. But Friday is Freya, or Frigg's day - the Norse goddess associated with love, fate, and death.

And the Stations of the Cross could easily be walking the labyrinth or the spiral path. Each station a crossing of a threshold. The body moving through states of grief to emerge into Spring (the resurrection on Easter Sunday).

And then of course you have the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998. I'm guessing a deliberate choice of date to capture the symbolism, a day of rupture, of something dying, before the possibility of resurrection.

Oh and Easter / Ēostre is believed to come from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Ēostre (or Ostara in Germanic tradition) — a dawn goddess of spring and fertility. Eggs and hares are her symbols. The Church conveniently absorbed the timing of her festival. Whether she was "real" or a folk memory is debatable, but the seasonal logic holds regardless.

Happy Easter.

Prairie Fire Press invites creative nonfiction on the theme of remembering and forgetting for our fall 2026 issue.

Our survival and growth have always depended on both. Memory helps shape who we are and how we understand our connection to others—personally, culturally, historically. Some memories bring comfort and joy; others are confusing, painful, even traumatic. Beyond individual experience, there are ancestral, familial, and collective memories that require unearthing, remaking, and re-examining. What has been buried? What has been reshaped over time? What needs to be remembered now, and what might need to be released?

We welcome work that explores the tension between holding on and letting go, and the ways remembering and forgetting shape healing, identity, and transformation.

We believe in the power of writing—in its plentitudes of forms, styles, and modes of exploration—to move the spirit, shift the gaze, and offer new perspectives. Founded in New York City in 2020, we are truly global: our editors, reading board members, and contributors (and their stories) represent an international and multicultural blend.

​

Our editorial team carefully curates each issue to bring our philosophy to the page and to our avid readers. We are most excited by works that approach the human condition from a mix of critical and creative approaches and we support exigent narratives and counternarratives. We're a proud member of CLMP and we've partnered with EBSCO to include our pieces in literary e-journal databases. As a featured listee on Poets & Writers, Submittable and Duotrope, we aim to amplify emerging voices and add to the growing diversity and vibrancy of the literary community.

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We publish high-quality short fiction that takes place more-or-less here, more-or-less now, with a supernatural or speculative edge. If you aren't sure what that means, check out our debut anthology, Broken Ground.

If you'd like to submit work for potential publication in our anthology series, you can do so through our partner publisher The Fiction Desk.

The spring submission call is open now, with a deadline of Friday 29th May, 2026.

Slant’d models a new way of working, one where patience, care, and personal connection are graciously given. I feel proud to be a part of this world that Slant’d has so lovingly reimagined for AAPIs.”

Unearthed is an online literary journal of environmental writing, published by SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. They are looking for writing that, “offers insight and attention—be it long deferred or newly cultivated—to our complex relationships with our environments.”

They accept all forms of creative work—poetry, fiction, creative and critical nonfiction, photography, videos, and artwork. And though they accept submissions from all authors, they are especially interested in showcasing new voices. With that in mind, they encourage unpublished authors to submit.

A conceptual look to cult images and the margins of 20th-century art and fashion history.

Journal: Next submission: July 1st 2026. Poetry, Prose, Art etc. https://www.instagram.com/p/DWRlDHIlV9O/?img_index=1

Asian-American-founded creative arts magazine accepting submissions for Issue 06 themed around food — a meal is never just a meal. Accepting photography, visual art, drawings, paintings, digital illustrations, multimedia works, and more alongside poetry, prose, and essays. Open to all ages, backgrounds, locations, and experience levels. Volunteer-run, completely free to submit.

A zine shaped by artists, for the bold, the curious, and the uncompromising.

Haus-a-rest exists for the creatives who notice what others miss, who translate lived experience into striking images and fearless words. This is a space for the daring, the different, and the deeply authentic.

Each issue brings together work that resists the obvious, fresh perspectives, quiet rebellions, and art that moves without asking permission. We’re drawn to the unseen, the unfiltered, and the moments that linger.

Our Open Calls remain free and open to all.

They’re an invitation to share what’s been forming, to test new ideas, and to connect with a community rooted in curiosity and creative risk.

Step into the zine.
Let’s carry forward the voices that refuse to fade into the background.

ANAMOSPHERE noun

From the Irish anam (soul, essence, animating presence) + atmosphere (from Greek atmos*, vapour, and* sphaira*, sphere) — the felt field that surrounds and emanates from a thing, place, or encounter; the vaporous sphere of soul.

That quality of presence in a room, a landscape, a made object, or a living encounter that registers before thought arrives — sensed in the body, the back of the neck, the chest — before words surface to name it. The anamosphere of a place is not projected onto it by the receiver, nor emitted independently by the thing itself, but co-created in the space of genuine meeting between a charged field and a receptive awareness.

Not everyone can receive it. Not everyone is willing to. It has always been this way. Those who can tend to find each other at thresholds — at dusk, at shorelines, in the thin places where the ordinary organising of consciousness loosens its grip and the filaments become sensitive again. To speak of anamosphere is not to speak of soul as theology, nor atmosphere as weather, but of that undefinable other — present, unmistakable, and stubbornly resistant to measurement.

| soo-SUR-uhnt | , adjective;

1. softly murmuring; whispering.

As in: This was our beginning, when the insistent squaw of seagulls crashing after urchins, susurrant grasses, and groggy frogs, the thin pitch, high pierce of insects was our music on any clear morning.

-- Christine Schutt, A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer,

1996

Well worth an exploration if you don't know him.

Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) was a self-taught , shy American artist who lived a reclusive, solitary life in Queens, NY. He created intricate, miniature worlds inspired by travel, astronomy, ballet, and European history.

Assemblages of his longings and dreams. He collected his objects and images from junk stores, bins, flea markets, making each object sacred with attention and placing them into his fantasy worlds. (These assemblages now sell for millions of pounds!)

adjective

maud·​lin

1: drunk enough to be emotionally silly

… a mob of maudlin rummies … sing hymns …—Joseph Mitchell

would crack open another beer and become maudlin—Patrick Moore

2 : weakly and effusively sentimental

maudlin expressions of regret

The history of maudlin is connected both to the Bible and the barroom. The biblical Mary Magdalene is often (though some say mistakenly) identified with the weeping sinner who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears to repent for her sins. This association led to the frequent depiction of Mary Magdalene as a weeping penitent, and even the name Magdalene came to suggest teary emotion to many English speakers. It was then that maudlin, an alteration of Magdalene, appeared in the English phrase “maudlin drunk” in the 16th century, describing a weepy, drunken state. Nowadays, maudlin is used to describe someone or something that expresses sadness or sentimentality in an exaggerated way; however, the “maudlin drunk” meaning was so intoxicating that it stuck around and became the “drunk enough to be emotionally silly” sense still in use today, as in “after a few glasses of port he became quite maudlin.”

Submission windows for 2026:
April 1 to May 31
September 1 to October 31

Deadline 07.05.2026

Theme: Desire

Issue Two explores desire in its many forms as more than longing or attraction, but as something more complex.

Rather than presenting desire as something simple or romantic, consider it as something that abstract , that reveals, distorts, and at times consumes.

"Our next open submissions period will be from Monday, May 18 at 10 a.m. EST and closes at 10 a.m. EST on Friday, June 5 or when we hit our submissions limit.

SPRING OPEN SUBMISSIONS: Call for feminist genre fiction - sci-fi, horror, fantasy/romantasy, and speculative fiction.

We’re looking for novels, novellas, and short story collections that bring a literary depth and flair to genre fiction— specifically sci-fi, horror, fantasy/romantasy, and speculative fiction."

The books branch of Humans & Nature Press is pleased to announce the 2026 call for proposals for single-author book manuscripts. For

The Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction. The Whiting Foundation recognizes that these works are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The grant is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving recipients the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.

On submitting work

Submissions might move through observation, story, or experiment. We welcome work that thinks in systems, that sees relationships and entanglements, and does not shy away from complexity.

This might take form as:
- Observations of land, seasons, and ecological change
- Stories of food, farming, and growing
- Encounters with more-than-human life
- Practices, rituals, or ways of paying attention
- Grief, care, repair, and renewal
- Artistic or poetic responses to place

We welcome both long-form and shorter pieces.

Submit by email to isabel@loamjournal.com

I did a daylong workshop last year on theatre of the object with Marie and Clement and it was so good, even with my linguistic struggles. They were kind enough to tell me that my first tentative efforts reminded somehow of their Belgian mentor's work. Every time I encounter them and their work, I want to run away and join a theatre of the object troupe, fearing that I've missed my true calling. Below is a translation of the text from the page above - the event and resulting work is so close to what we were discussing I wanted to share it.

Event Details

“I’ve always loved maps and plans; they give me a wonderful feeling of immersion. When you live somewhere, daily life and habit make you lose sight of the inherent poetry of your surroundings. You no longer pay attention to the memory of this neighborhood.” – Marie Carrignon,

member of TAC TAC.

Clément and Marie from Compagnie TAC TAC, in partnership with Le Périscope, want to recreate a poetic map of the city of Nîmes.

To do this, they need your help, because what would a city be without the stories of its inhabitants?

They are therefore collecting your stories: a memory that took place in Nîmes, a happy or sad moment, a very personal or absolutely spectacular event.

Some ideas:

A walk in the city

A very old but vivid memory

Something that happened at school

An unforgettable weekend or vacation

An unusual encounter with someone or an animal

A unique dish, snack, or picnic

A historical anecdote

A building in the city that you particularly love

And anything else!

You can share your stories at Le Périscope on Wednesday, May 6th, from 2 pm to 5 pm.

By collecting the stories of Nîmes residents, we are awakening all these little individual memories and together creating a poetic map of the city.

To encourage a different perspective on these living spaces, to show

that a place is only as rich as its inhabitants.

You are therefore invited to Le Périscope (4 rue de la Vierge) on Wednesday, May 13th, at 6 pm to see the performance that will have emerged from this collection of memories and to see your city from a new angle.

The journal hosts short articles and photoessays by academics and practitioners from a variety of disciplines.

For 14 years, Atticus Review has enjoyed a steady flow of creative collaboration between readers, writers, and the editorial team. Our website/magazine/newsletter has evolved in format and flavor, but our commitment to indie publishing, emerging authors, and great literature has remained steadfast. Our revolving staff of editors has curated, shaped, and posted the work of over 1700 contributors.

We are accepting submissions in the categories of:

Reviews, Critical Essays, Short Fiction, Interviews, Non-Text Responses ( these should be direct non-text responses to an artwork(s) or approach to the categories listed), Poetry in Dialog with an Artwork, Crit Bits (250-500 words)

Issue 5 will be published digitally on Substack and our Website. In previous years we’ve produced printed issues, but this year are currently planning for a fully digital format.

Submission Guidelines:

- Length: up to 1,500 words (Crit Bits: 250–500 words) for text submissions.

- Please review the Submission Guidelines within the submission form for further details. 

Beautiful sea-faring maps layered with gold leaf.

From the middle English clew, which meant a ball of thread or yarn. The modern definition of "a guide to solving a mystery" evolved directly from the famous Greek myth of Theseus using a ball of thread given to him by Ariadne, to safely navigate and escape the Minotaur's Labyrinth.

"To feel solastalgia is to feel pain, sorrow, and grief (from the Greek algos), but it is also to recognize that the source of this pain is our love for the places of which we are part."

We welcome submissions in the following formats:

• academic research articles (6000-8000 words)

• interviews (1000-3000 words)

• book reviews (between 1500-3000 words). Please note that correspondence/suggestions/requests for reviews should be sent directly to reviews@www.maifeminism.com

• creative writing (poems, short stories, creative responses, max 3000 words)

• video essays (5-10 min + a brief supporting statement 800-1000 words)

• photographs, visual/audiovisual or interactive art

Other types of submissions may be considered at the discretion of MAI editors-in-chief. Any questions regarding the format or type of your prospective submission should be sent to contact@www.maifeminism.com. Please read MAI Manifesto & The Journal before sending us your writing or projects. MAI only publishes work that fits into its feminist & visual culture remit.

Bridgette Hamstead 

NeuroJustice™

'Every late-identified AuDHD woman has a family tree full of people who were never identified, and the silence around what those people were is the product of generations of families doing what families do when they don't have language for something: they explain it differently, they organize around it without naming it, they develop a set of shared narratives that account for the behavior without ever reaching the neurology underneath it. The grandfather who was brilliant and impossible becomes a character. The aunt who never quite fit becomes a cautionary tale. The mother who raged or withdrew or couldn't be reached becomes the reason the family is the way it is. The neurodivergence travels through the generations unnamed, shaping everything, explained as something else entirely.

The silence is maintained by several forces simultaneously. Stigma is one of them, the cultural association between neurodivergence and deficiency that makes naming it feel like an accusation rather than an explanation. Family loyalty is another, the implicit code that what happens inside the family stays inside the family's own interpretive framework and is not subjected to outside analysis. The absence of language is a third, because you cannot name what you have no words for, and for most of the twentieth century the words were not available in the rooms these families were living in. And then there is the protective function of the existing narrative, the story the family built to explain its difficult members, which is often load-bearing in ways the family doesn't fully understand until someone tries to revise it.

What breaks the silence is almost never a family conversation. It is almost always one person, usually a woman, usually in midlife, usually the one who was most affected by the unnamed neurodivergence around her and inside her, who gets the language first. The late identification is the crack in the silence. She gets the framework, and the framework is immediately and irresistibly retrospective, and she starts applying it to everything, to her own history and to the people in her family tree, and what she finds there is the neurodivergence that was always present and never named, expressed across generations through whatever channels the culture and the nervous system made available.

The family's response to her naming it tells you everything about the family system. Some families receive it as relief, as the explanation that finally makes the whole story make sense, and those families are capable of doing something real with it, of revising the narratives, of extending compassion backward to the people who carried the neurodivergence without a framework, of extending it forward to the children who are still young enough to have a different experience than the generations before them. Those families exist, though they are not the majority.

Most families receive the naming as a disruption. The narrative that explained the difficult grandfather and the impossible aunt and the mother who couldn't be reached was doing protective work for the people who built it, and the neurodiversity framework threatens that work by relocating the explanation. It takes the behavior that was attributed to character, to weakness, to pathology, and attributes it instead to neurology and to the structural failure of every system that surrounded those people without identifying or supporting them. That relocation is accurate and it is uncomfortable, because it asks the family to hold a more complicated account of people they have long since filed under simpler headings.

What the woman who breaks the silence is actually doing, whether she understands it this way or not, is a form of epistemic repair. She is restoring accurate information to a family history that was built on the inaccurate explanation available at the time, and she is doing it at personal cost, because breaking the intergenerational silence about neurodivergence in a family that built its self-understanding around the silence disrupts the system. It reassigns the accounting. It asks people who organized their understanding of themselves and each other around the old narrative to consider that the narrative was always incomplete.

What it gives the generations that follow, if the family can receive it, is something none of the previous generations had: the accurate explanation before the damage accumulates, the language before the self-concept is built around the wrong story, the framework before the years of trying to understand yourself through a lens that was never designed for your neurology. It is, arguably, the most significant thing the late-identified AuDHD woman who breaks the silence passes on, and it costs her something real to pass it on.'

BAS-RELIEF

Paule Pascal 1965

ART INTEGRATED INTO ARCHITECTURE

During the construction of the Maison de l'Agriculture (House of Agriculture) in Nîmes in the 1960s, now the Hôtel du Conseil Départemental (Departmental Council Building), the architect Joseph Massota (1925-1989) commissioned artists as part of the "1% for Art" program. For this building, he collaborated with the ceramist Roger Capron for the ceramic mural at the entrance and the sculptor Paule Pascal for the bas-relief on the building's north facade. Two remarkable heritage works!

BORN IN 1932 IN MONTPELIER

DIED IN 2019 IN BEAUVOISIN

Paule Pascal began her training very young: at 15, she entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, then joined the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1954, where she studied in Marcel Gimond's studio until 1958.

Paule Pascal had a predilection for sculpture in architecture. Throughout her career, she remained faithful to the use of the light yellow stone from the Pont du Gard, which she worked in a style that was both brutalist and understated.

This work, emblematic of her art, is a monumental bas-relief sculpted in situ under the direction of architect Joseph Massota in 1965. On a wall approximately 26 meters long and 3.5 meters high, she engraved stylized motifs: vines, fruit trees, ears of wheat, and women harvesting grapes.

The relief is constructed with stone slabs of varying thicknesses, creating a subtle interplay of light and shadow depending on the viewing angle. This composition, both lyrical and rigorous, blends naturalism with a masterful geometric language inspired by the golden ratio, making the whole a veritable "stone lacework."

Her work continues to astonish passersby with its mixture of abstraction and naturalism and resonates with the work of other artists, notably the colorful mosaic created by Roger Capron, which begins in the main aisle of the Departmental Council building and continues into the entrance hall.

Belatedly I thought of the origin story of Discworld, a magical world born from the imagination of Terry Prachett, the English writer, satirist and activist. Discworld is a flat disc situation/supported on the backs of four giant elephants (named Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon, and Jerakeen), themselves standing on the shell of the colossal turtle - the Great A'Tuin, - swimming through the cosmos.

Great A'Tuin was inspired by the ancient World Turtle myth found in Hindu, Chinese, and Native American cultures. 

Pratchett explicitly adapted the Hindu cosmological model where the world rests on the backs of four elephants, which in turn stand on a giant turtle (often named Kurma or Akupara).  

He also incorporated the logical problem known as "turtles all the way down," which questions what supports the supporting turtle, using it as a satirical exploration of narrative causality and the absurdity of seeking infinite foundational proofs. It’s a humorous expression of the philosophical problem of infinite regress, where every explanation requires a further explanation, leading to an endless chain with no foundational base.

Leila is seeking rigorous yet conversational writing that will translate academic concepts and discourses into public dialogues, such as: empire, colonialism and decolonization, war, slow violence, extraction, restoration ecologies, survivance, indigeneity, biopolitics, the “Anthropocene,” reproductive futurism, deep/geologic time, racial capitalism, plantation economies, climate change as colonialism, climate migration, energy humanities, petro-cultures, industrial histories, extinction studies, militarized landscapes, the politics of breathing, and more. 

Some recent examples of published pieces she's recently published include this essay on petromodernity and the US war with Iran by environmental historian Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, Heather House on "Knowing Fictions," and reviews and interviews on the release of new works by literary mycologist Maria Pinto, animal and water advocate Sangu Iyer, Native American writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, poet Donika Kelley, Alexis Pauline Gumbs with Jason Allen-Pasisant's Possibility of Tenderness, and more. 

Reach out to Leila with a pitch or any questions at leila(at)lareviewofbooks.org. You can also send clips of your writing if you would like to be contacted for possible reviews of books in your interest and research areas.

In doing so, we at the Conflictorium envision ourselves as a medium that helps build bridges creatively; highlighting how social change is possible through innovation.

QW is looking for writing that is: Exciting. Challenging. Risky. Unpredictable. And Different.

We could say what different means, but then we might receive a slew of submissions that are all different in the same way. Different will be victim to form—to the “fragment sentence,” “non-linear plot,” and “hybrid genre.” Different will be beholden to space, time, story, and moment. This does not seem the way to open the door for Different.

We think Different doesn’t open a door, actually. Different doesn’t know doors or windows. Different stomps in. Maybe it seeps in. Sometimes, and in our favorite works, different is always already there and it strikes flint and blazes. This is what we look for.

Send us your work. Seep in. Stomp in. Strike us. Set the familiar voice on fire.

Modern life can be a curiously disembodied experience: we swipe and scroll, crop and click, zoom and control+z; our interactions are often mediated by screens or filters; we no longer look one another in the eye as we once did (or we’re forced to do it on Teams).

Are our flesh-and-blood selves becoming attenuated and atomised by the increasingly digital texture of our days? What’s the fate of the human body in this age of looksmaxxing and biohacking? How do our historic perceptions and misconceptions of bodily states and identities, including disability and gender, inform our present and shape our future?

Check in with your body for this edition of Griffith Review.

Things to note:

* We’re looking for non-fiction and fiction that responds to the theme.
* We want pieces that are no longer than 4,000 words.
* We’ll let you know the outcome of your submission within eight weeks of the call-out closing date.

Submissions open: 09.00 am AEST, 13 July 2026

Submissions close: 11.59 pm AEST, 23 August 2026

We have built a space that fuses art, politics and science while platforming brilliant emerging and under-represented writers and illustrators in the climate movement. We publish a bi-annual, 60 page collection that dives into difficult environmental questions, and in Spring 2023 we launched this digital platform.

The Vermin is returning for its fourth issue. We’re looking for work that explores the theme “flood.” Flood might be the central metaphor of our current conjuncture: a crashing catastrophe; a deluge that empire cannot contain. While imperialism seeks to weaponize, contain, and regulate water, flood is a force of resistance against enclosure. It erupts and spreads beyond control, breaking confinement and re-shaping landscapes irreversibly.

The Vermin is a critical experimental magazine for the underbelly offering a platform for the subversive and peripheral. Based in Toronto, Ontario, we are a volunteer-run collective of young and emerging writers, artists, editors, and designers. 

• Photographers

• Collage-artists

• Illustrators

• Poets

• Short-story writers

• Essayists

• Graphic Designers

Each issue’s theme isn’t predefined, but instead, it emerges organically, every two months, from the submitted work, without top-down curation, imposed direction, or editorial bias. Just quiet trust in what artists bring forward.

We publish all forms of poetry: written, drawn, painted, photographed, or filmed. Think of this not as a zine, but as a shared stream of consciousness or a collective search for meaning. A breath of fresh air in an age tainted by AI, ego, and money, where sincerity dares to win over perfection.

We believe the need to create is inherently human, just like the need to express, to give, and to share. To be seen, understood, and accepted. To connect and to belong. We wish to enable every artist to do just that.

Due to being permanently disappointed with so-called reality, this platform is here to share work that is challenging, philosophical, and against convention.

Cabbage Patch is a new online journal of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, fragments, photos, images, and “strange hybrid things.”

“Think of this as a literary attic full of strange stuff.” They’re looking for emotionally resonant writing, and they “believe in warmth over prestige.” They love publishing new authors, and they welcome reprints.

Founding editors Joe Ponepinto and Kelly Davio started Tahoma Literary Review in 2014.