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?

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.

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

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.

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. 

It’s our belief that, much like the definition of “wayward,” literature does not follow one set rule or path. It doesn’t always travel in one direction. Wayward Literature magazine means to symbolize the journey that inevitably comes with the writing process.

Nightmares are just as unique as the person who fears them: they're all about perspective.

Short Takes is open for bragging. Of all the fabulous things you have done in your life, until now cloaked in demure silence, which makes you proudest?

In November 2023 we will publish our third annual issue of Quaker Fiction. It’s open to all genres—crime, fantasy, romance, science fiction and horror, young adult, and more. Surprise us with your work!

Our favourite poems are the unexpected kind. We love free verse poems that take familiar situations and turn them on their head, using unusual metaphors and drawing parallels no one else would see.

We’re seeking work about the end. Send us your take on the end of a meal, the close of a journey, the end of life, or anything else.

We have no genre expectations, just send us something that is utterly you – from beauty to beast, creative non-fiction to allegorical fairy tales – we just want to revel in the potency of your voice.