Just Tapped: Issue #21 – Give It to Me E-gain: The Chapbook Review Issue

For our summer issue we want to read e-chapbooks published from January 2014 to May 2016. Self published is okay, but each chapbook must be available for download online through a publisher or personal website. Chapbooks that are not currently available online do not qualify. We are not interested in your unpublished manuscripts at this time.

SUBMIT ONE CHAPBOOK ONLY. All members of our staff will be reading cover letters this issue—think of it as your back cover. Get our attention with 50-150 words describing your chapbook, a biography, and a link to where your chapbook may be purchased or downloaded online.

Selected e-chapbooks will be showcased in July with a mini review by one of our staff members and a mini feature of selected work (2-3 poems; 1-10 pages of prose).

Submissions due 6/11/16.  Issue live 7/31/16.

 

Issue #20 – Trigger Warning

Paul Gilmartin once wrote, “I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, ‘Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?’ or ‘Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?’ But you can’t say that at a cocktail party.”

For this issue of cahoodaloodaling, we want you to send us your art and writing about everything you can’t say at a cocktail party. Send us your letters, your poems, your paintings, your drawings, your collages and essays. Send us your hearts. Send us what you’ve never been able to speak about, the things that wound you and threaten to bring you under.

This is a safe place. A place where you can let go of your secrets about anything at all that has triggered or traumatized you, be it abuse, an eating disorder, a miscarriage or abortion, monsters that hid beneath your bed in the form of humans. Sometimes it’s not an elephant in the room but another person, or a poem you can’t write, a piece of art you couldn’t create.

This issue is where you can put to rest all the times you felt like jumping off a bridge.

Submissions due 3/19/16. Guest editor Meggie Royer. Issue live 4/30/16.

 

“Life During Wartime” at Pankhearst – edited by Evangeline Jennings. Anthology of prose only. No minimum length. A tentative maximum of 10,000 words. All stories must be set in America some time after the new President has taken office. Imagine a country run by Donald Trump, the Brothers Koch, and the Open Carry Mouthbreathers who think it all went wrong when people stopped whuppin’ slaves and women were allowed to wear shoes. The people who think the answer to school shootings is to give teachers guns. Imagine The Holy American Empire: black lives, brown lives, and poor lives don’t matter, and everybody knows and acts accordingly; you’re trying to raise a family, finding it harder every day, worrying perpetually about your monthly payments; you’re about to be put on the train “home”, even though you were born in Illinois. Yes, we’re talking immediate future dystopia blues. Submissions due 1/31/16. Read more & submit at pankhearst.wordpress.com.

“See Into the Dark” at Pankhearst – Slim Volume #4, edited by Kate Garrett. Anthology of poetry (40 lines or less) and flash fiction (750 words or less). Fear is something slightly different for all of us. This will be a book of oddities and causes for alarm. Serial killers? Ghosts? Demonic possessions? Monsters under the bed? Kafkaesque? Maybe you have a strangely creepy story or poem you wouldn’t consider horror at all. All okay, but as always, please keep realism involved in the proceedings: if you’re going to be otherworldly, make sure it could happen in this one. (No sparkly vampires.) Send up to 5 poems or 3 flash fictions – or a reasonable mix of the two. Submissions due 2/5/16. Read more & submit at pankhearst.wordpress.com.

Summer Artist Residencies at Firefly Farms – Sundress Academy for the Arts, Knoxville, TN. SAFTA is currently accepting applications for our summer residency period (May 30th to August 28th) for short-term artists’ residencies in creative writing, visual art, film/theater, music, and more. The SAFTA farmhouse is located on a working farm less than a half hour from downtown Knoxville, an exciting and creative city of 200,000 in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. Each residency includes a room of one’s own, access to a communal kitchen, bathroom, office, and living space, plus wireless internet and cable. The length of a residency can run from one to week to two months. Fellowships and scholarships are available those with financial need as well as writers and artists of color. Applications for summer residencies due 3/15/16. For more information and to apply, visit sundressacademyforthearts.com.

“Curious Specimens” at Sundress Publications – edited by Jennifer Hanks. Wunderkammer-themed e-anthology. We want your Wonder Room’s creepiest inhabitants—think the Mütter Museum, reanimated Fiji Mermaids, and all creatures caught between life and death. While we’d love to see your poetry and flash fiction, we also welcome ephemera. Send us excerpts from taxidermy pamphlets, specimen lists, and medical notes. May your most unsettling work find a home with us: bottled, hand-labeled, and doused in formaldehyde. Please submit no more than 3-5 poems or 2 flash fiction pieces as an attachment to anthology@sundresspublications.com with the subject line Curious Specimens_LAST NAME. Include a brief cover letter and bio. Submissions due 4/1/16. For more information, visit sundresspublications.com.

“90s Pop Culture” at Up the Staircase Quarterly – special themed annual issue. We are seeking poetry and artwork involving and inspired by 90s music, TV shows, movies, fashion, games, technology, food & drink, and trends. Beginning in January, UtSQ will provide editors’ favorites and weekly writing prompts. Submissions due 7/1/16. Read more & submit at upthestaircase.org.