qarrtsiluni

Happy May Day! We’re excited to announce a new bimonthly theme of both timeless and topical interest: Water. Here’s how the guest editors describe it:

Water is the moving skin of our planet, the most part by far of our bodies; we drink it, we bathe in it, we waste it and taint it, we may yet again wage wars for it. In all its forms — saved in vessels, falling as rain, fountains from rock, wells and springs, woodland pools, rivers, streams and oceans — we invite you to explore water’s depths, and to lose yourselves in the looking-glass world of its reflecting surfaces, to acquaint yourselves with the natural creatures and supernatural beings that are born from and live in it: mysterious ladies, merpeople, nixes and naiads, undines and kelpies…

Ponder the preciousness of water, the rituals and sacred places that attach to it, its properties and prohibitions (can witches cross water?), its power to calm and to cleanse, to refresh and to destroy. The first separation from it is central to many creation myths; we cross over it, under it or, when parted, through it to reach the next life, new lands, new worlds.

Stirred up, left to settle, filtered, channelled — we await some deep, sparkling, refreshing responses.

Though the Nature in the Cracks issue will continue through May 7, submissions to the new issue are now open. The deadline is May 31. The editors suggest a 1000-word limit for essays or stories and a two-poem limit for submissions of poetry this time. As always, we welcome submissions of prose, poetry, images, video and audio; see the How to Contribute page for more details on how and where to send them.

Photo by Arturo Lomas Garza

The editors are both regular contributors to qarrtsiluni, and each has had some work rejected (as have almost all our regulars), so they’re well acquainted with our editorial style. They are also each proficient photographers as well as writers, and combine a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts with a strong interest in the natural world.

Lucy Kempton is British, living in Brittany with husband and dog, and sometimes teaching English. She blogs at box elder — subtitled “meanderings of a displaced dilettante” — and the microblog Out with Mol. She also supplied the photographs for an online project called Compasses, in a call-and-response pattern with the travel sonnets of British blogger Joe Hyam.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Huston-Tillotson, an historically Black university on Austin’s East Side. A poet active in the community, she also serves on the board of Texas Folklife, is the current president of Austin Poetry Society and is a Research Associate of the Humanities Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. She and Arturo Lomas Garza blog about their artistic projects, many of which are collaborations, at Katudi Artists Collaboration.

As always, we look forward to hearing from past contributors and newcomers alike. We’re still a little surprised, and greatly honored, that so many gifted artists and writers have chosen to share their work with us. We’re especially grateful to everyone who has made qarrtsiluni a regular part of their daily or weekly reading. Thanks, and have a great spring!

—Dave Bonta and Beth Adams

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