We are looking for your Autumn (that’s Fall, to our American readers) themed short stories. As ever, there is one main rule. It must make us laugh!

A howl can be grief, warning, prayer, or celebration - but always, it is a reaching. Who do we become when we are unheard? What remains when sound fades, and only the echo lingers?

This special edition of Penumbra is dedicated to the beasts with whom we share our homes, our world, and our imaginative spaces.

You’re in. Stay out of. If it isn’t too much. Get in good. Trouble is the prompt for Issue 9. Send us your work, troubling or not, but please, no cruelty to animals…and, come to think of it, no wolves.

Laal (लाल) translates to the colour Red. Let this colour bleed into every form, every voice, every memory. Let it remain untamed.
Write to us what laal invokes for you.

As we approach these cooler months, we invite you to send us work that reflects on states of dormancy, whether they be chosen, given, natural, unnatural, or imposed

For this issue we’re looking at Indigenous Peoples and Friends, both the history and current relations.

Rats and raccoons go together like... well, something. We all like trash. Also, funerals. Probably? We don't know what it means either. We want to read your spin on the theme. Do with it what you will. Open genre.

For this issue, we seek accounts of meaningful encounters—with people, places, or animals—that have altered your perspective or understanding of the world, as well as re-imaginings of what it means to encounter and be encountered by others.

This issue will explore the vagaries of nationalism, citizenship lost and found, what it means to have more than one national identity or passport, and to have none. So, who, what, where is your tribe?

Visit a museum––can you hear the muses singing? 

For our upcoming issue, we want stories, poems, and hybrids that unearth the horror of embodiment. Think haunted anatomy, sentient scars, inherited monstrosity. Is your skin a map or a mask? Show us where it hurts, and how it changes you.

For October, we invite you to explore Rite in all its forms: sacred or secular, celebratory or unsettling, personal or collective. What happens when a rite is denied, disrupted, or transformed? Explore the power that rituals hold over us when the candles burn low and we think no one is watching. 

Everyone deserves a second chance, but that chance is not always freely given. How does redemption affect the human experience– or does it not? 

We are interested in work that reflects on the  systems we unearth around us.  Living as we are, we are interwoven and defined by the systems we support, fight against, and ponder about.

Show us what it means to love something unironically and to risk sincerity in a world that rewards cynicism. How do we “kill the part that cringes” so the part that loves can finally breathe?

Surprise us with work that stretches the meaning of kinship—personal or collective, intimate or cosmic—while staying true to the urgency of our times.

In the spirit of promoting global peace and contemplative artistic expression, Zen Peacemaker’s showcases three haiku a month on this page.

In a time of fake news and counterfeits, scammers and artificial intelligence, tell us how you’re sifting through the layers of conceit. Send us your most suspicious stories, fallacious arguments, and prose that teeters between fact and fiction. 

We’re looking for pieces that embody the spirit of Nocturnia: eerie, elegant, unsettling, or uncanny. This is not just horror — it’s the haunting echo in a quiet room, the bittersweet memory that resurfaces at midnight, the beauty in the grotesque.