August 2020 (eighth month) is Arachne Press’s eighth anniversary. We are preparing an eight-legged arachnid inspired anthology.
Stories and Poems featuring spiders.
I’m going to make it difficult for you – NO spiders to be killed (except possibly whilst heroically defending…) This is not a venue for spiderhaters to vent their angst.
Meet Mildred, currently resident in the garden of Arachne Towers
Think Charlotte’s Web or Leese Webster for adults, Spider as hero, not spider as villan.
Length:
Stories: shorter the better, but for something exceptional we’d push the boat out. ABSOLUTE max @3-4000 words.
Poems: whatever works for you. Eight lines? Sixty four lines? Concrete poems? Invent a new arachnid form!
Experimental:
Yes, if you want to play around with the eight idea, we’re open to playing along, especially in poems.
Genres: Spider fantasy, spider whodunnit, spider romance, spiders in space (why not?) Open to most things with the exception of the following: Avoid twee, please. NO EROTICA. NO HORROR. NO GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE NO SEXISM, RACISM, HOMOPHOBIA… you know the drill. We mean it, so just don’t do it. We’ll put you on a list if you do, and send the spiders to get you.
Reprints: We much prefer original work, but will consider magazine reprints. If it’s in a book, then no, unless it’s out of print and you retain the copyright. So check first, and make it clear it is a reprint and where it was before, and when.
A note from our friends at University of Greenwich
Story Cities – a call for flash fictions
‘The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind . . .
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist’
– Marco Polo to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
In Calvino’s masterful work, Marco Polo explores images of distant cities where time, space, objects and individuals are presented in visions. Each description is filled with varying degrees of enchantment, absurdity, impossibility and allure.
The weaving of these accounts questions what is real and unreal; recollections of disparate lands invoke the realisation that perhaps all reveal a single place so that:
‘the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there’ (Calvino).
The city is a place where populations meet and strangers pass one another. Where stories are created, told, remembered and discarded. One city connects us to the memory or spirit of another; repeating rituals and behaviours which provide spectacle for the tourist
and uniformity for the global citizen. As we move within the city we operate within the systems that transport us, the signs that guide us, the encounters that confront us and the thoughts which carry us.
Brief – call for submissions
This brief invites submissions for new short works of fiction in any genre that address the theme of the city. It asks you to explore the journeys we take; the situations we encounter and interact with; the dialogues and connections we make – in order to highlight universally shared experiences and understandings of the city and / or imagine them
differently.
Working under one (per story) of the following themes:
the Market, Square, Café, Hotel, Park, Station and Port, Main Street, Side Street, Crossroads, On the train, On the bus / tram – writers are asked to create narratives that speak of / to / through the city.
Story Cities is a collaborative research project initiated by lecturers at the University of Greenwich, London Rosamund Davies, Senior Lecturer in Media and Creative Writing and Kam Rehal, Senior Lecturer in Graphic and Digital Design. It explores ways in which
stories might respond to, reference, reflect and reimagine the city. Selected works will be published in a physical book that readers can carry into cities – to experience the city through stories. Acting as guides, companions and tools for reflection, we hope that the stories can encourage the reader to experience the city differently.
You are invited to participate in this project by submitting new short works of fiction in any genre that address the theme of the city.
Guidance
There are a set of guidelines that we ask contributors to work with:
1. All contributors must be aged 18 and over
2. Each story can be between 1–500 words in length (no longer), excluding title
3. Up to 3 stories may be submitted by each contributor
4. Names of specific places must not be used – nor should characters be given names. Your story should be written so that it works in any city
5. All submissions must be works of fiction and the author’s own work, unpublished and in English. If this work is under consideration elsewhere you must inform us immediately if it is accepted
6. All work must be submitted with author’s name and a contact email – please do not supply any additional contact details at this stage
7. All work must be submitted by the named author and he/she must hold rights to the material
8. All contributors must sign and complete the consent form and submit this with
their work(s)*
9. There will be no monetary reward for inclusion in the publication but a copy of the book will be presented to each contributor. Copyright will be retained by the author, with licence for exclusive publication for a to-be-agreed period not exceeding one year.
Once we have received and considered all submissions we will edit an initial selection of stories for publication.
If you have any questions please contact:
Kam Rehal and Rosamund Davies at the University of Greenwich on: StoryCities@gre.ac.uk +44(0)20 8331 9013
SUBMIT TO StoryCities@gre.ac.uk Deadline for submissions: 16/09/2018
