qarrtsiluni

Happy May Day! We’re pleased to announce that submissions are open for a new qarrtsiluni issue: Economy. The guest editors this time are Anna Dickie and Pamela Hart, and we’ll let them explain.

Economy has its roots in Greek — oikos and nomos — meaning the principles necessary to maintain the household. It’s a thoughtful word. The study of economics, until the 18th century, was a branch of philosophy.

And it’s the word of the moment. It dominates the evening news. It’s determining how we spend or save; whether we remain in our homes, keep our jobs. It has governments around the globe cutting, bailing and re-thinking spending plans. It’s full of associations: think Wall Street bull or bear or greed. Think sub prime mortgage. Then there’s the technical jargon: quantitative easing, collateralized debt obligation and the fallacy of composition all seem ready for metaphor.

With this in mind, we urge you to think broadly, associatively and imaginatively about this touchstone word. Consider economy of movement, expression or effort. Think fuel, cash or gift economy. In your investigation, remember the epigram and the epitaph, both concerned with the economics of composition. Think about how the subject might inform style, as well as content.

However, don’t be burdened by the word’s current negative connotations. For Hannah More, a 19th century British religious writer and philanthropist, the word resounded with hope. She described “the economy of the heart, which saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.”

Whatever medium you choose to work in, be it words, photography, music or video, make economy earn its keep to deliver a piece that nails thought, character, place or plot. As Anne Carson wrote in Economy of the Unlost, “Economy is a trope of intellectual, aesthetic and moral value.”

The deadline for submissions will be May 31, and the issue will begin appearing on the site in June. Please limit submissions of poetry to five poems, and keep essays and stories below 1,000 words. See our How to Contribute page for guidelines.

The editors are, as usual, both past contributors to qarrtsiluni (click on their names to view their contributions here). Anna Dickie is a photographer based in East Lothian, Scotland. In the last three years she’s won or been short-listed in a number of competitions, including having a shot hung in the Scottish Parliament as part of a touring exhibition on the theme of coastal erosion. She also writes poetry, and has had two chapbooks published: Peeling Onions, a series poem about coming through a cancer diagnosis, and Heart Notes, just published by Calder Wood Press. She blogs at My (Elastic) Gap Year.

Pamela Hart is a former journalist. Her chapbook The End of the Body was recently published by toadlily press. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as BigCityLit.com, Rattapallax, Lumina and Kalliope. She is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art and teaches writing at Long Island University’s Graduate School of Education. She blogs at A Walk Around the Lake.

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In other news, we’re just wrapping up Mutating the Signature, our longest and most stylistically diverse issue to date. If you haven’t yet taken the time to browse through this marvelously varied showcase of collaborative writing and artwork, you have a real treat in store for you. And you’ll have some time to do it, now, because we don’t expect to start publishing the next issue until June 1. In the meantime, we’ll be hard at work on the Mutating podcast and print edition, so look for those as well. And we hope you’ll take advantage of this brief hiatus in your daily qarrtsiluni reading to prepare a submission for Economy — and maybe finish up an economy-sized collection of poems for our chapbook contest, too!

—Beth Adams and Dave Bonta