PFN – Call for Submissions to About Place Journal. Theme: Strange Wests

West has always been more than mere direction, a setting sun,  evening. In lands now known by many as the United States of America,  West invokes a fraught mythology of wilderness and conquest, of destiny and riches, of jackrabbit homesteads and romantic distances, of cowboys  and bears. For so long these symbols have dominated our histories of  these lands, centering whiteness and masculinity in a rugged, difficult  terrain. But the West and its frontier have always been strange, full of contradictions, queer even. As Josh Garrett-Davis, a curator, scholar  at the Gene Autry Museum of the American West, posits of the regional  West, “[It is] a borderland—or two-or-more-sided frontier—where old and  new coexist, collaborate, fight, innovate, [holding] ample grounds for  new stories.”

The West as we understand it has never been uninhabited. People have  thrived in communion with these lands for thousands of years. Flora and fauna, too. Where some see vacant desert, or land to be occupied for the next housing development, we cast our eyes upon resilient life, those who understand the importance of water and resource conservation. In South Dakota, Indigenous water advocates protest pipeline routes, while Chicano artists muralize the scar of a border wall with the painting of  roses.

We call contributors to conceive of the West beyond its conventional and colonialized framework. What happens when the dam breaks, when waters flow along their pre-colonial course and stewardship is returned to the original caretakers of the land? There are many ways to deconstruct a dam, an archetype, to unearth histories long-buried in sand or alpine forest. The West is multiple and many.

In the next issue of About Place Journal, we invite you to consider and reimagine all things West. Send us your visual poems and performances, your experimental stories and essays, your art classified  by no other name than art. As we decenter traditional subjects and propagandized histories of this ambiguous region, share with us your witness and protests, your lineages who have lived here longer than the word itself and this country. We are particularly interested in work from young, emerging artists (17 and younger), as well as work by BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists, especially those whose stories have been excluded  by a mythology of the west centered on whiteness, masculinity, and  extraction.https://aboutplacejournal.submittable.com/submit/282282/strange-wests

About Place Journal Submission Guidelines

• Poetry: up to 3 pieces which do not exceed 50 lines each. Acceptable file types include doc, docx & rtf. If your poetry submission contains special formatting, we suggest submitting a PDF in addition to your Word doc.
• Fiction, essays, creative nonfiction and other prose: up to 3 pieces which do not exceed 4000 words each. Acceptable file types include doc, docx & rtf.
• The total number of submitted pieces cannot exceed 5, even if your submission includes items from several genre categories.

Each submission must be accompanied by a bio in doc, docx or rtf format. Bios should be in the third person and not exceed 150 words. Please include your website, Twitter and Instagram links if desired.

By submitting, you guarantee you hold the rights to the work, and you grant About Place Journal the rights to publish the submitted work with first serial rights (FNASR). After publication, rights revert to the author. Original, previously unpublished work only. All pieces must be submitted through Submittable.