New terrain, onward

In some ways, this call for work is familiar ground—we’re still using the same submission system, we are still community-centered, we’re still an Amsterdam-based international publishing entity, we still gravitate toward the experimental—and in other ways, it’s new terrain, a different journey. Not only is this our first submission call for book length manuscripts as a small press vs a journal, it is also our first-ever contest. And in that respect, the current call comes with the experiential learning curves, questions and the notes-to-self.

There are the technical questions, there are the operational questions. There are craft-related questions, genre-specific questions, budget-related questions, production-related questions, existential questions. Many existential questions.

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Versal, my tongue-bone

The literary journal is a complicated gesture. It is an archive, a necessary ephemera, of movement, aesthetic, reaction, and change, but it is also a quicksand of these things; in its fleeting multitudes, we can barely keep track. Some are, from a scattering of watchtowers, and we are grateful to them for their compulsion, because it must be a compulsion to keep the thousands of us in sight.

But whether we see them or not, literary journals are the bricks beneath our communities, beneath our readings and publishing houses. In their very gathering of us, they are our starting points and the proof of our existence as we try to make books and be invited to festivals—and maybe we never reach any of these things but at least our name appeared, our poem or story came out in print once, that once we were writers.

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