…from the tender beautiful About Place Journal:
Practices of Hope
About Place Journal seeks poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, art, and hybrid forms (including video, digital storytelling, sound, performance documentation, etc.) for our themed issue, PRACTICES OF HOPE. We want to showcase creative practices as activist tools, ways of making change, as well as forms that can bring people together. How can creative practice allow us to feel and act differently? How can we invent new appreciation of and new embodiment practices for humans and other fellow creatures? What can ‘speculative’ or ‘non-realist’ forms mean, and how can we make them resonant for eco-arts?
Many of us cannot afford purely apocalyptic and dystopic fantasies. What else can activate new relationships to climate crisis, species extinction, and environmentally-located social pressures in racist, abelist, classist, ageist, and sexist times? How can we imagine a different future with more of us in it? What hope can we afford? What hope do we need?
This call casts a wide net for creative work. We also specifically invite engagement with emergent genres like solarpunk and cli-fi (climate fiction), or with the histories of Afrofuturism and related genres.
Inspirations for this call include publications like Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, eds. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland (2017) and Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015). For Octavia’s Brood, the two editors, Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, worked with activists in multiple fields to explore the use of genre narrative to communicate the need for change. They write: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.” Likewise, we seek art forms that imagine a better future as speculative creative acts.
Let’s create as activists, as artists, as organizers. World-change and art practice hand-in-hand, breath, word.
Here’s the link to submit: https://aboutplacejournal.org/submissions/