Anarchist Fictions Journal: Call for Submissions and Financial Support
Anarchist Fictions is a new print journal of original and reprinted short fiction and poems on themes about, or adjacent to, anarchy. Set to launch in early Winter 2025, the journal will be 150 pages of beautiful art and writing that captures and recreates the fiery will to destroy existing society. We need to raise $4200 by April 2024 to make this happen. The first 25 donors of $50 or more will get a journal mailed to them in Winter 2025. Proceeds will go to paying for the printing of the journal, and paying our writers and artists. Funds raised that exceed our goal will go to increasing honoraria for our writers and artists. Read on for details about the journal and how to send us your work.
Why This Journal?
The idea for a journal of anarchist fiction started in summer 2023, around the time that the sky above our city turned a greyish orange. We were reading about the domestic terrorism charges against Atlanta Forest defenders at the same time we were reading stories by Kelly Link, Margaret Killjoy, Alba De Cespedes, and Ted Chiang. Air tasting of burnt plastic scratched the inside of our lungs raw. In this city, the grownups kept the children indoors all day; in other places, grownups hurriedly bundled children into vehicles, evacuation underway. The kids watched hell through car windows, remembering stories of comfort or of ruin, and grafting them onto new stories of survival bubbling up inside their little brains.
Elsewhere still, the planet's watery muscle tore down roads and bridges. A question that could pop up in an innocent game of Would-You-Rather became absurdly real: Would you rather die by fire, or drowning?
Moose, deer, skunk, rabbit, coyote, squirrel. Cardinals, woodpeckers, thrush, crickets, worms. Sacred and insignificant at the same time, man-made disasters are choking out, starving, sweeping away these creatures and their land.
Sacred and insignificant ourselves, we scrawl tiny words on bus shelters, grow vegetables, steal and cook and share food, throw rocks, sometimes get bundled into prison cells. Too often we work like dogs. Other times we sign out books from the library, trade zines, carve linocuts, send free PDFs and hearts and flames, whisper stories. The setting of our lives is a nightmare and we, little gross creatures addicted to warmth and comfort and imagination, need these stories to get by. We too will be choked out, starved, and swept away. In the meantime, we want entertainment and the illusion that our words will last.
Every season brings fresh hell, but projects lend us continuity and a sense of rational order. Autumn is RICO charges and genocide in Gaza, and our, the editors', first talks about what characterizes the stories we love. Winter brings us a deep darkness in which we reflect on our powerlessness and imagine a future spring of power. In this dark nest we are writing this request that you send us your stories that we will read and consider in the spring.
We are making this journal for selfish, selfish reasons, but maybe you too have a selfish desire for reading and writing anarchist fictions. Let's help each other out.
About the Editors
Anarchist Fictions is the creation of two broke lazybones addicted to reading, writing, and anarchy. You can call us Vague and Ominous. We have degrees, but not in English Lit. One of us is a published writer and has sat on a couple of publishing collectives; the other could win a medal for the number of books they've signed out from the Toronto Public Library. We love wild and liminal spaces where the weeds grow through cracks. They will eventually turn to trees that break the city apart. We're here for the forest's revenge.
Anarchist Fictions' Volume 1 Guest Poetry Editor, Cid V Brunet
Cid V Brunet (they/them) will be guest editing poetry for the inaugural issue of Anarchist Fictions. Their memoir, This Is My Real Name, came out in 2021 and you can read their latest poem, "Blue", in the winter issue of Contemporary Verse 2.
https://www.cidvbrunet.com/
Insta: @cidvbrunetwrites
Anarchist Fictions' Volume 1 Guest Artist, Bog
This issue's art (and this Indiegogo page's art) comes to us from Bog, a swamp monster drawing imaginaries for a new world from a small cave in Montreal.
The Writing We Are Looking For
"...editors have a very hard job and the main part of it is to find a few things to love, that they can publish. It’s a lot of work to run a magazine or journal and, in the end, what the audience is paying for is the editor’s taste, expressed radically in the choices he or she has made, especially in terms of what stories are getting run."
- Story Club with George Saunders, 2023
We will print five to six original stories, and five to six original poems, that we love.
Short fiction
Vague and Ominous love dark, subtle, well-crafted literary fiction about anything related to anarchy or anarchism: chaos, social collapse, uprisings, new beginnings, sabotage, subterfuge, collective undertakings, individualist scheming, sociality, desertion, love and its variants, despair, euphoria. We're open to both nihilism and futurity, experimental forms and plot.
Although we primarily gravitate towards genre-defying literary fiction you wouldn't find at the airport, some particular genres nonetheless influence us. We appreciate not only stories that fit into these genres, but also less easily categorized stories that carry their traces: surrealism, magical realism, speculative fiction, slipstream, gothic, and literary horror. If you have written any anarchy-adjacent southern gothic, definitely send it along. We also have a soft spot for the comedic and the absurd.
We are not looking for writers who are specifically anarchist, and we are not looking for pieces that are simplistic renderings of capital-A Anarchism. Take a look at our influences below - most of the writers who anchor our taste are not anarchists. Their subject matter ranges widely. These stories are not necessarily about anarchy, yet are undeniably concerned with power and transformation.
Poetry
Cid says, "As a guest editor I can’t wait to read your most subversive, least apologetic, writing. I will consider any form of poetry, though I tend towards more narrative and comprehensible pieces. Thanks for submitting your poems while the world continues to burn."
Our Influences
Cid: "I'm inspired by poems that shake my entrenched understandings, break through loneliness to arrive at connection, and poems that make me take a hard look at what is. Here's an example of a poem I love by Diane di Prima":
Revolutionary Letter #12.
the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction
the vortex of artistic creation is the vortex of self-destruction
the vortex of political creation is the vortex of flesh destruction
flesh is in the fire, it curls and terribly warps
fat is in the fire, it drips and sizzling sings
bones are in the fire
they crack tellingly in
subtle hieroglyphs of oracle
charcoal singed
the smell of your burning hair
for every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction
rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy
- Diane di Prima. from a 2014 anonymous reprint of Revolutionary Letters, Third Edition from 1974, City Lights Books, San Francisco.
Vague and Ominous' favourite short stories and authors:
"Previous Condition" by James Baldwin
"Not One of us Will Survive This Fog" by Margaret Killjoy
"Ovando" by Jamaica Kincaid
"Borders" by Thomas King
"Doris is Coming" by ZZ Packer
"The Semplica-Girl Diaries" by George Saunders
"Sensini" by Roberto Bolaño
"Bloodchild" by Octavia E. Butler
"Soul" by Andrei Plantonov
stories by Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis, Hanif Kureishi, and Ted Chiang
and, of course, "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemison's "The Ones Who Stay and Fight"
Types of stories we don’t want:
We are not into genre fiction that won’t be understood by people not already familiar with it. This includes but is not limited to high fantasy and extremely technical science fiction.
Things we don’t like in stories:
- elves, orcs, etc.
- writing that is too prescriptive (or descriptive)
- sectarianism or pedantry, especially together
- gore
- stagnant, static tropes or stereotypes
- shit we interpret as ignorant, needlessly offensive, or harmful, including but not limited to racism, sexism, and transphobia.
Submissions
Where to send your work:
We are accepting submissions through the free submissions platform Moksha: https://anarchistfictions.moksha.io/. Be sure to include a 50- to 100 word author bio with your submission. Please note that we may also choose to solicit work directly from our networks. Presently, we do not have the systems in place to read submissions without knowing who the author is (a.k.a. reading "blind"), but we will strive to do this in the future. Again, check back here for updates. You can reach us at anarchistfictions@proton.me.
Deadline:
Whichever occurs first: May 10th or when we receive 75 stories (in the short fiction category) and 75 poetry submissions with up to 5 poems per submission (in the poetry category).
Response time:
We aim to respond to all submitters by June 30th, 2024.
Short Fiction Submission Details:
5,000 - 10,000 words. Submit only one story. We may consider shorter pieces. We pay at least $50 per story. Please double space your entry, number your pages, and use Times New Roman 12-pt font with standard margins. Unfortunately, at this time we are not accepting short fiction translations or short fiction in languages other than English (though we are accepting side by side translations of poetry: see below).
Poetry Submission Details:
40 lines max per poem, up to 5 poems per submission. You can include a short (250 word maximum) statement of meaning with your poems if you'd like. We pay at least $10 per poem, but are aiming to pay $35 per poem. Please single space your entry, number your pages, and use Times New Roman 12-pt font with standard margins. If your poem is outside of these boundaries please include a short explanation of why in your statement of intent.
We will accept poems in languages other than English with side by side translation to English written by the writer themselves or their direct representative. We are not accepting formal translations at this time.
