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.

FOOD AND COVID-19

As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon. It has, and will continue, to change our day-to-day lives in extraordinary, immeasurable ways. Certainly, Covid-19 has already impacted our personal culinary habits and has caused us to take a closer look at our food systems.

From the abundance of crackly sourdough boules on Instagram to the further exposure of meat-packing plants’ unsustainable practices; from restaurant closures to the transformation of grocery shopping; from the absence of friends around our dinner tables to the way we relate to food, our bodies, and ourselves while social distancing—coronavirus has fundamentally shifted the culinary landscape.

For this new, ongoing series at Entropy Food, we invite all forms—essays, poems, comics, cookbook reviews, etc.—that address the topic of food, eating, and/or the body amid the pandemic. We would simply like to provide a space for writers and artists to explore this topic, however feels most nourishing. To submit, please email your work to stephanie@entropymag.org and laurenrosales@entropymag.org Recipes and photographs welcome.

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.

BLACK CACKLE

BLACK CACKLE: A FEATURE OF VERY DARK HUMOR seeks sleekly, darkly funny works where the sad and the hilarious converge.

Please send your very dark and funny short stories under 3,000 words / poems of any length / hybrids to august@entropymag.org.

LONG TAKES:

The substance of cinema is therefore an endless long take, as is reality to our senses for as long as we are able to see and feel (a long take that ends with the end of our lives); and this long take is nothing but the reproduction of the language of reality. In other words it is the reproduction of the present.
— Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations On the Long Take”

Please submit writings, essays, musings, reflections, fictional vignettes, responses, or other texts written about or through a filmic long take. #LONGTAKE

More info and the call for submissions here.

Email: janice@entropymag.org

#FINALPOEMS:

A call for submissions. All poems submitted will be included. Because one yet wants to believe that poetry can still be about the catastrophe and beauty of one’s own heart, and the generous giving away of those words to another.

If the world were to end next week, what is the final poem you write, the final poem you give away generously, treacherously, genuinely, fearfully, necessarily, beautifully?

That tomorrow it may very well all end, and we would know to bear the pain as the day rose and broke.
That the present is undying yet death awaits us all.
That words can still connect and touch, that we still know how to offer to others a piece of our soul.
That space yet expands and we know when to keep breathing and when to stop.
That poetry can yet be given and received, from one human being to another.

Send your #finalpoems to janice@entropymag.org to be published until the world ends, at Enclave.

See the series so far: #FINALPOEMS