A periodical of smart new queer writing with a disco heart
Outburst Arts is pure excited to announce a brand new periodical of queer writing, with the launch issue dropping at Outburst Queer Arts Festival in November 2021. For our first issue we’re inviting some writers we know and love to share work and ideas and also leaving it wide open to new and established voices who would like to submit. We love surprises.
This is a non-academic periodical , making space for exciting new queer thinking, hits of literary goodness and accessible commentary on queer art, culture and ideas that there currently isn’t a platform for here.
Edited by poet Mícheál McCann, this is a publication that doesn’t compromise on big ideas in queer thinking. There’s space for everything from poetry to journalistic think pieces, long form essays to cultural reviews that will intersect and speak to our current moment. Anything that will expand our thinking, conversations and creativity in new and energising directions.
For the first issue of this publication we’re inviting you to explore queer joy. After the year that’s been in it, we could do with some meditation on queer joy, which has a history of persisting despite efforts to quell it. What does radical queer happiness look like? When so many ways and places we connect have been disrupted, where do we find our queer delight in connection? How and where is joy found in the body, in queer space, in the everyday, in community, in dancing, in kinship, in gentle transgression and bold imaginings?
Let’s see where we can take this. We would love to read your:
— long and short-form non-fiction (essays; commentary; think pieces up to 3,000 words, or else a 300 word pitch to the editor; pieces as short as 500-750 are welcome too! think micro-reviews, postcards or cultural diaries)
— poetry (2-3 pages of poems, up to 40 lines each; if in-translation, please include original [and have the rights to reproduce])
Please send all work and to micheal@outburstarts.com as a Word document or .PDF, alongside a short artist/writer biog (no more than 100 words). If you are submitting a pitch, please attach examples / links to existing writing. Simultaneous submission of your work elsewhere is fine, but please inform Mícheál if your work has been accepted elsewhere.
Contributors will be paid for their work.
Deadline for submission: July 9th 2021.
PHOTO ID: A wooden ladder is held up against a grubby white-wash building. One individual at the top of the ladder holds a pink triangle in their left hand while the right clings onto a metal grille. Three people are at the bottom of the ladder; two steady it while a third in a vivaciously yellow jumper and white bowling shoes directs the person hanging the pink triangle. Their hands and arms are posed at jaunty angles, as though they are posing a model or a photograph.
Photo credit: 1981 Don Woods, from the LGBT History Archive. Erection of pink triangle at Hirschfeld Centre, Dublin.
