Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Call for Submissions at Unsettling Wonder

A new publication titled Unsettling Wonder is calling for submissions, which close on December 1, 2012.  The theme for the fist issue is the folk motif of wonder voyages (the Odyssey is the first thing that comes to my mind).

The aim of Unsettling Wonder, or what I understand from their goose-flesh summoning introduction, is to tell tales for the love of story; to conjure the numinous in a way only a story-as-it's-being-told/read can; to keep the trade alive, from master to apprentice.  Come to think of it, storytelling is one of the oldest professions in the world.

Woods and princes, elves and fools, voyages and rolling cheeses, tricksters and righteous sages, kings dressed as beggars, stories told by thieves.  We want to tell these tales, not as deconstruction or subversion, not as nostalgia or sentiment, but in the same way these stories have always been told--spun out and re-imagined by the tale-teller in the moment of telling, for the ones who hear it, to reclaim the magic of story.
There is, after all, no real past in literature, just as there is no real future.  Any literary work lives, unalterably, in an eternal now--the moment the writer or the reader sees or hears the words on the page, and follows them to whatever unknown regions lie beyond.

There is also a pristine introductory article by Katherine Langrish of Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, author of Dark Angels and the Troll Mill series.  

I know already I'm going to relish anything put out by UW.  Here's to many future years bright with wonder and dark with mystery.

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