qarrtsiluni

Submissions are now open for the Fragments issue, with a deadline of just one month from now: June 20, the solstice. The issue editors are Olivia Dresher and Catherine Ednie. All submissions must be sent through our submissions manager.

Theme description

The theme for this issue is fragments: writing “in the wild.” Overly crafted pieces can feel less honest, less real, even boring… whereas fragments are illuminations, a flash of lightning, a light turned on for just a second. Shards, torn pages, unstrung beads, homeless paragraphs, scraps, brevities, miniatures… brief excerpts from notebooks… writings that may be aphoristic or simply wordplay, meditative or emotionally raw… unpredictable, probing, urgent, spontaneous. We love writing that contains an element of surprise, reflecting a commitment to fragments as a literary genre.

Send us your pieces that stand alone or consist of a series of short fragments. Optionally, we’d also like to receive (as an introduction or postscript) your thoughts on the mystery of fragments… or simply submit fragments about fragments. We have a preference for fragments that can be read on the screen without much scrolling, roughly 500 words or less. We’re also seeking art work and photography on this theme, as well as audio and video recordings. Please note that audio recordings for the podcast will be voluntary for this issue, due to the challenges of recording fragmentary material.

To read about fragments as a literary genre, we recommend the Introduction to In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, which can be found in the book description online. And to explore fragmentary writing in more depth, visit FragLit Magazine, where you will find many fragments, as well as bibliographies of fragmentary writing.

Editors

Olivia Dresher is a publisher, editor, anthologist, and writer of poetic fragments and aphorisms. She is the publisher of Impassio Press, and was editor of FragLit Magazine until it was suspended in 2010. She is also co-founder and director of the Life Writing Connection. Her poetry, fragments, and essays have appeared in anthologies and in a variety of online and in-print literary magazines. She is the editor of In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing and co-editor of Darkness and Light: Private Writing as Art: An Anthology of Contemporary Journals, Diaries, and Notebooks. She has written thousands of poetic fragments at Twitter (@OliviaDresher), spontaneously, and plans to select some of these for two print collections.

Catherine Ednie is a writer of fragments who is happy to have found a home for her work at FragLit, qarrtsiluni, and the In Pieces anthology. She also has been exploring the possibilities of fragmentary writing at Twitter (@cednie). She is a proud member of her local poetry community, Poem Alley at Curley’s Diner, Stamford, Connecticut, and has edited and contributed to a number of their publications. She writes: “My writing is deeply rooted in keeping a personal journal, a regular practice for 40+ years. At some point, I became disenchanted with traveling what felt like the same old territory in my journal. Using techniques from poetry — rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, detail, narrative — I found I could go to new places in my notebook. From reading and studying poetry, I learned ways to keep writing meaningful yet mysterious, and engaged with both emotion and language. I’ve explored automatic writing, prose poetry, constraint-based writing (OuLiPo), and visual poetry. I like to surprise myself when I reread what I have written. Thanks to Olivia Dresher, I found out I was a writer of fragments.”