Special Calls for Work

Below, please find our special calls for themed issues. To find out more information about our standard issues, please click here.

Trans is the future. The future is trans.

Deadline: July 5th, 2022. To be published August 20th, 2022.
Please direct work to Cavar, at editorialcavar@gmail.com.

And while our trans might begin with gender, presentation, and embodiment, it certainly doesn’t end there. For this special issue of beestung, we’re seeking works by nonbinary and two-spirit writers that cross not only gender but also genre and form. We want your barely-legible; your not-fiction, not-poetry, and definitely-not-binary words. We want speculative work that can only do what it does outside and against the bounds of traditional “poetry” and “fiction,” informed and delivered by people outside the bounds of binary gender. 

Here, the “speculative” in speculative fiction connotes not just the content of a work, but the way that work is delivered: what possibilities live in the omitted word and white space between verses? Bring in the fabulist, the fabulous, and the fantastical –– take us to the very limits of your imagination, in form and in content. Think Delany, Butler, and LeGuin. Think Solomon, Lai, Gailey, Chambers, and Jemisin. And then, take us to the futures we have yet to read.
Further details:

—You define what hybrid, experimental, and speculative mean. That said, we’re not likely to accept work that fits easily into form or genre categories, nor work that does not include some element of the fantastic.
—lists, recipes, schematics, manifestoes, meditations, rants, ravings, etc. welcome. 
—Your work need not be *about* being nonbinary (though it also can be!)
—Previously unpublished and/or multiply-marginalized writers are especially encouraged to submit.

Please send work for the Trans is the future. The future is trans. issue to Cavar at editorialcavar@gmail.com.

[sarah] Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press and founding editor of swallow:tale press. Author of four chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press), THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit), and OUT OF MIND & INTO BODY (Ethel Press, forthcoming), and BUGBUTTER (Headmistress Press, forthcoming) they have also had work in Bitch Magazine, Electric Literature, The Offing, and elsewhere. Cavar lives online at www.cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.