Events

This theme can be interpreted in so many different ways, on so many different levels…

The purpose of The First Line is to jump start the imagination--to help writers break through the block that is the blank page.

This issue turns to the arts to foreground and forecast what is next for nature, food justice, water preservation, climate action, and afro-/Indigenous futurisms.

What brings us into profound relation to place—and what pulls us out? In a social world that feels less and less place-dependent, and a physical world that is being reconfigured by climate change and habitat loss, how do we sustain our connection to physical place?

How has the human–animal bond evolved over the centuries? And what truly separates us from the creatures we share the planet with?

We wants to know what compels you to rush to the mailbox, turn on your notifications, or put your money on the line. 

This issue opens up space for feelings and thoughts around grief and food. In our grief we celebrate what was, cooking our ancestors’ favourite meals, finding connection at your local restaurant, and finding an old recipe book.

Raw, unvarnished truth gleaned from living an unpasteurized life makes for more interesting reading than the average schlock. Write it how you feel it.

Solastalgia. Tightening at the smell of smoke. Recoiling at the sight of receding glaciers. Close the news app. Shudder in a foreign home. I’m sorry for the heat. I’m sorry for the mercury. This is a new kind of grief, with a nascent voice. Speak to it.

We are looking for works exploring trespass within nature; access to natural spaces, the right to roam, rural trespass and land ownership are all specific interpretations of this theme we’d particularly like to see

We share work here representative of shared human values, however differently those values might be expressed in our various religions and cultures.

We want personal stories that are raw, honest, and vulnerable in their explorations of mental health or mental well-being and their intersection with inequality, access to healthcare, the need for accessible, quality mental health care, and/or the need for open conversations about mental health and practices that contribute to mental well-being.

Our mission: to bring a little more good poetry and art into the world

Send us your birdsong-inspired poetry, the symbolic, the prophetic, the transcendental. Channel Walt Whitman. Interpret the theme in a unique or unexpected way.

With this issue, we want to take the best and most potent markers of our time and put them in a metaphoric time capsule. We want to know what you value and how those values will look after the test of time.