Call for Submissions - e.g. Journal, Exploding Galaxies
Dr. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz
Academic and Literary Advisor, Exploding Galaxies
Editor, e.g. Journal
Siargao Island
e.g. Journal—Call for submissions
Exploding Galaxies Press republishes lost classics of Philippine literature. In doing so, however, we realized that it is one thing to republish a novel, but quite another to revive it. Just because a work is reissued, doesn't mean that it gains new life.
If there is no contemporary reinvestment of meaning into a work, it dies, whether it remains in print or not. So this is what I have joined the press to do—working to integrate the novels into university course material, creating literary guides, and helping to amplify the larger discourse in which they are situated. It is toward this latter goal that we have created the new journal e.g.
e.g. publishes pieces that are fascinating, but that were too focused, miscellaneous, extraneous, or experimental to incorporate into anything larger—a research tangent on the history of ylang-ylang perfume that couldn’t form part of a larger argument; short story scenes or variations on opening stanzas regretfully cut; archival finds and excerpts from old ethnographic interviews, as well as forays into new formats explored just to see where they may lead. We pair these offcuts of prose and poetry with a visual artist chosen to conceptually highlight the text, and who is tasked to respond to the writing with a leaf from a sketchbook. Our first issue features a 'false start' to Glenn Diaz's novel Yniga, an alternate opening to that work that he ultimately discarded, but that shines in its own right as well as in conversation with the published opening it helped pave to take its place. Meanwhile, our second issue will feature an experimental piece by Vicente L. Rafael who has for several years been writing an anti-autobiography told through snippets of notes and online interactions—an auto-biography of a life he has not lived—that he could not find the right outlet for before.
Our intention is to give a home to such various Philippine wanderings and explorations, housing them within a growing index of themes emerging from the books that Exploding Galaxies republishes—our canon of lost classics of Philippine literature. Exploding Galaxies’s first reissued novel, But for the Lovers, highlighted the theme of the grotesque, for example; our second novel, The Three-Cornered Sun, the intimacies of the domestic. We hope for e.g. to widen the world of Philippine letters in which we may discuss our lost classics and through which we may reinvest contemporary meaning into our long literary tradition—renewing the connections between past and contemporary, classic and experimental, lost and deleted. However, given how capacious our upcoming catalogue is, such themes hardly count as a restriction. We will easily find a fitting theme from Exploding Galaxies for any piece accepted to e.g.
We both commission writing—approaching the freshest, most interesting thinkers and writers— and consider submissions addressed to me, our Editor. It is in this vein that we ask if you may have anything lying around that you may wish to contribute to our journal, something that has not yet found a home. We aim to make it as easy as possible for the best writers to work with us, so we do not have any expectation of receiving completely new work, unless of course that may be something you wish to pursue with us. We'd be happy to explore your off-cuts, excised tangents, old drafts, extraneous miscellany, sketches, archival finds, field notes, and experiments, or anything else that you may be open to giving us.
I look forward to receiving your pearls and drafts and little finds, and to bringing them into the light, at once bold and tentative.
Warmest wishes, meanwhile.
Nicole
nicole@explodinggalaxies.com
