THE BIRDS:

An invitation for writing and personal stories relating to birds. Stories involving loss, being lost, stories involving birds, changing relationships to writing and being written, to writing practice, to self, to the sky. Submissions of personal and poetic essays related to the birds. Essays on birds, a bird, a particular species of bird, all birds, your bird.

Please email submissions directly to: janice@entropymag.org.

See the series so far: The Birds.

WOVEN

WOVEN is an Entropy series and dedicated safe space for essays by persons who engage with #MeToo, sexual assault and harassment, and #DomesticViolence, as well as their intersections with mental illness, substance addiction, and legal failures and remedies. We believe you. If selected for the series, we want to provide the editorial and human support such that our conversation continues long after the stories and names have changed. You can view submission guidelines for WOVEN here.  Submit to Sylvia Chan at sylvia@entropymag.org. 

Reread the archives, always. 

HEALTH/WELLNESS

If only health and wellness were as easy as the magazines, blogs, and Instagram accounts would have us believe. I’m interested in work that celebrates physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual fitness, but also digs into the contradictions and complexities inherent in such ideas. I want to read pieces that critique wellness culture and challenge popular narratives of what it means to be in good health. I’m particularly intrigued by examinations of the ways modern health and wellness are talked and written about.
Submit to ian@entropymag.org. 

COOKING ORIGIN STORIES:

The food section at Entropy wants to hear about your greatest cooking victories and most epic failures. What was the first dish you ever cooked? How did (or didn’t) you learn to cook? Write about a dish from your childhood you’ve since poorly attempted or serendipitously recreated in adulthood. Write about a food you used to hate that you now love (or vice versa). Write about your love for the kitchen, or your desire to burn it down. Recipes and photographs encouraged.

Please email submissions directly to: stephanie@entropymag.org.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME:

Music can hold enormous power in memories and experiences, transporting us instantly to an age, location, or person. What sonic joys, mysteries, disbelief, and clarity have you experienced? Identify songs of influence in your life and explore them like variations on a theme, melding syntax and song structure, recalling the seriousness or levity that accompanies. Whether it’s an account of when a specific song first entered your life, the process of learning to play a song, teaching someone a song, experiencing the same song in different places as it weaves through your life, unbelievable radio timing, sharing songs with those in need, tracking the passing down of songs, creative song analysis etc, I am interested in those ineffable moments.

And so I’m welcoming submissions of your own variations on a theme, as drawn from your life’s soundtrack. Please email submissions to meganentropy@gmail.com and keep an eye out for others’ Variations.

Details.

LITERACY NARRATIVES

If writing defies “common sense,” if it seems to go against traditional modes of thought, norms, and histories, the idea of that common sense no longer makes sense, or might make sense if we’re allowed to reinvent ourselves. That’s what I’m looking at with the literacy narrative, the coming-into-language story. I want to hear yours: when you first “clicked” with a language,  whatever it is; why you questioned the modes of your Englishes; how you wrote “poetry,” but looked at it again and called it “lyric essay.” I want to see your literacy narrative in its scholarly, creative, and hybrid forms. Send your literacy narratives to Sylvia Chan at sylvia@entropymag.org. Stay tuned for more literacy narratives from yours truly and others.

DRAMEDY

Send me your dramadies. Send me your stories filled with levity but centered around a decidedly serious theme. Tell me how humor has helped you heal. Tell me about the inappropriate moment when you laughed at a funeral, or the joke your dad made about gaining supernatural powers from the radiation during his cancer treatment. Bring me the stuff of an episode of an episode of Louie, works in the spirit of David Sedaris writing about his mother’s death. Show me the levity you find in the tears, the moments you laughed until you cried, or cried until you laughed, or laughed and cried in the same breath.

Please email submissions directly to: erin@entropymag.org

See the series so far: Dramedy.

ARTS & CULTURE

Arts and Culture is everything that you imagine. Have a conversation with a filmmaker or musician. Interview a playwright. Chat with puppet-makers. Critique an exhibit. Discuss the implications of language. Wonder about the body. Wonder about movements, gestures, signs. Meditate on a piece of writing, piece of music, or work of art. Deliberate on architecture–a building, a bridge, a space. Describe a performance. Describe a project. Reflect on a protest. Reflect on a place. Trace a history. Ask those questions.
Submit to adrienne@entropymag.org.