Our 3 pillars feed into all of our writing prompts and challenges.
- Radical Embodiment
Your body is your site of meaning+sense-making. Its interactions with the external world produce awe, distress, wonder, desire, discernment, and ever-expanding understanding. A disembodied brain can’t taste or touch or see an apple, though it might be fed second-hand simulations from words others have used to describe the apple. Start your writing process by returning your attention and focus to the aliveness of your somatic experience.
If you want to submit work, this pillar in particular is something you should explore in your origin/process statement.
2. Dignifying Departures
Speculative fiction is writing ‘of the imagination’. We encourage a process that’s grounded in the body and simultaneously allows for departures into: what could be, what might have been, what else is possible?
Ursula Le Guin – a science fiction and fantasy author – once said, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”
3. Brighter Visions
Works that are informed by deep cynicism or nihilism – and provide no window towards a reality outside of that worldview – are less likely to find a home here.
There is no requirement to provide a ‘happy ending’, but even the most heartbreaking of tragedies can affirm the value of joy, relational ways of being, the natural world, the dignity of life, and the potential for flourishing.
Let your work hold open a distinct window into a brighter vision, however briefly.