Call for Submissions: 👣Transpacific Literary Project 👣
The Transpacific Literary Project is opening a new submission period for literary work from writers in East and Southeast Asia for future publication in The Margins. This folio’s subject: shoes without heels. Submit by July 14!
They come with many names: selipar, slipper, スリッパ, sandal, sandal jepit, ស្បែកជើងផ្ទាត់, house shoe, dép, ေျခညွပ္ဖိနပ္, 拖鞋, 人字拖鞋, tsinelas, 슬리퍼, รองเท้าใส่ในบ้าน, รองเท้าแตะ, flip-flop, and more.
Perhaps not obviously worth your literary attention, TLP is focusing on these objects, seen everywhere and easily overlooked, as a way to gather ourselves around a shared (in)significance. What do these little shoes reveal about a foot, a home, a custom, about the ground they (do not) touch? How do they mark the wearer? How do they mark the boundary between inside and outside? What beliefs are instilled in them? What values? What fates? What rules? What happens when one is lost? What stories do they carry?
Please send your best original writing or original translations—submissions are accepted in any language of East and Southeast Asia—in whichever form fits: poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, exploratory or experimental prose. Submissions including photographs and audio recordings are welcome. Projects might include work that:
– Invites this familiar object to be considered in unfamiliar or strange ways
– Maps the places where they walk in a day, and where they are not allowed
– Reveals how they embody something culturally specific and/or culturally shared
– Considers their nuanced relationships to socio-economic class, purity and
cleanliness, comfort, bodily or domestic servitude, the work-home divide, the
inside-outside binary
– Draws connections to another culture through tracing their origin and trade
***
All contributors, writers and translators, will be paid.
If your submission is a translation, please include the work in its original language as well as a biographical note about the author in your cover letter. AAWW will hold exclusive print and online rights to your piece for 90 days, and your piece will be archived online. All other rights remain with the writer and translator.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but we ask that you withdraw the piece promptly if it is accepted somewhere else. If you need more information, please get in touch with editor Kaitlin Rees at krees@aaww.org.
*One of the aims of The Transpacific Literary Project will be to interrogate the idea of the Transpacific, and where exactly the region might lie. As such, the following list of countries should be regarded as indicative and non-exclusive; broadly, East and South-east Asia consists of: Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, Guam, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and their diasporas.