Call for Submissions: Winter 2024

Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed.
—Hélène Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa, 1975

Hello beloved Selkies,

Greetings from the sunny shorelines of Santa Monica, from the granite cliffs of Squamish, from the deciduous forests of Providence. Fall is of course a transformative time; as the world changes around us, we are reminded that we are also called to– and allowed to, change (We need a couple good deaths/rebirths in this life!). Depending on where you are, Selkies, autumn may remind you of this cycle of life— through the sight of leaf colors, the sound of migrating birds, the chill in the air, and the taste of seasonal fare like spicy mead, pumpkin breads and freshly picked apples….

In this upcoming issue, we ask you to think about one sense that may come to the surface during the fall season: Smell. As you wade through decaying leaves, as you clean up a rowdy potluck you had last night, as you come home from sweaty afternoon field games, as you head to the beach at low tide, we ask you to think of smells, of stink, of putridness.

Our world today can be very polite, it often smells nice. We are used to the ambient fragrances of fabric softeners, searing garlic and onion, sandalwood candles, and our best friend’s shampoo. But sometimes harsh smells make their way into our lives: The garbage disposal breaks after you stuck half a fish skeleton in there; your dog finds a dead bird in the woods and wrestles with it; you didn’t clean out your travel mug for a few days; there’s some malodorous standing water in the gutter; the laundry piled up for just a few days too long; you snuggled up to a bedmate or a beloved and found your nose in their armpit.

We are calling for stories about stench, about rottedness, about decay, chemical alarms, shit and sensing. We are interested in the smells of the body, inorganic smells, biohazards, pheromones, potions and glands. Disgust us, selkies! Let’s together seek out those places that make us shudder in our very organized world. Let’s use our noses to find those things we might violently throw in the dumpster. Let us open up the things we would hide in a sealed container at the bottom of the ocean. This is the olfactory selkie, the selkie of held breaths, the stinky selkie.

As always, we accept any form of writing, lab report, self-help, performance art, tea recipe, kitchen rag, potato print, fly tape, visual score, pressed flowers, worm squiggles, band aids, and friendship bracelets that are able to be printed. We print in color. Our pages are 5” x 8” landscape format, and we can accept pre-formatted pages with at least 300dpi, or we can format your work for you. Please keep submissions under 8 pages long. Email submissions to selkiezine@gmail.com. And don’t hesitate to reach out with questions.

We are accepting submissions for Stinky Selkie until moonrise in the Santa Monica Mountains on February 1, 2024, at 10:23 PM.

Thank you so much for your submissions, for your readership, for your community. We love you so very much and are always lifted up by your existence. <3 We hope you come across some delightfully pungent dirt, some musty seasonal drinks, and a dank and stinky pal or two this season.

With much love,

B, A, E