Saturday, March 11, 2023

Call for Experimental Writing: L=Y=R=A

L=Y=R=A is a quarterly literary magazine publishing experiments and language. Interpret 'language' however you like - a single word, if interesting enough, is attractive to L=Y=R=A. We want to see the nascence of language, its bareness, its skeleton, and the inner-workings of its acoustics. We want to see your world in the eyes of language, your exploration of the greatest human phenomenon, however fantastical, esoteric, weird, or weirdly normal it may be.

You see, communication is a strange experience. We produce sounds, and those sounds arrange themselves in structure, and voila! understanding is birthed. This, of course, is a boiled-down definition of language, but we want to see what your definition is. We want to see how language forms, sounds, tastes, and feels to you, and we want to accrue a body of work that attempts to illustrate the complex underpinnings that make up this day-to-day human feature - the feature so entrenched in us that we sometimes forget the brilliance needed to presuppose a simple word rolling off the tongue. However you interpret language - in literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, art - we want to see it.

By the way: we may seem as if we're modeled after the Language Poets at first glance, but we find issue with much of their pursuits regardless of their contribution to the world of poetry. We care a great deal about diversity and perspective; we're also aware of how the tongue of language has been both used and abused. Rather than honing-in on some superficial view of language, we'd love to see language in any form, however confessional or abstracted it may be.

​Although we do have some guidelines, for our sake.

  • We respond quickly - typically in under a week, sometimes a few days. We give time-preference to donated submissions.
  • We accept submissions for the first three weeks of a given month and take one week off for management/reading.
  • No more than 5000 words - can be one or multiple or five-hundred works, we don't care, but we prefer groupings of 5 max - eg., section your five-hundred works off so we can format properly.
  • No more than 10 visual pieces, too.
  • Everything should be in one document.
  • Only unpublished work (query if otherwise) in preferably 12-point font.
  • Simultaneous is fine.
  • Multiple submissions are fine up to two.
  • A bio and word-count is appreciated.
  • We're technically fee-free, but largely for those who cannot afford to pay. We ourselves have difficulty with funds and spend a lot (of time and money) on this project - so if you can donate, please do.
  • We pay our contributors an honorarium.
  • Art and written works go in the General Submissions form.
  • Choose your submission-type - General Submissions (any sort of language), Vonires (made-up words), and Snippses (snippets/bits of random-ness) - in the submission form. More details on our website.
  • Tailored, in-depth feedback - for no more than $10 a pop (each piece) - goes under the Feedback Submissions form (editors, I should note, have a background in literary/art theory and criticism and are well-versed and well-published in language themselves). We only give feedback for our issue-published submissions (general). 
More information and submission portal here.

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