Open call for xeno short stories
MAKING KIN II: Plants
My stories are suggestive string figures at best; they long for a fuller weave that still keeps the patterns open, with ramifying attachment sites for storytellers yet to come. I hope readers change parts of the story and take them elsewhere, enlarge, object, flesh out, and reimagine the lifeways of the Camilles.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016)
Camille 1—the first in five generations of Camilles in Donna Haraway’s “The Camille Stories”—was born in 2025. To celebrate their birth, Cthulhu Books wants to publish the second volume of the Making Kin series in 2025, and proposes to extend kinship from non-human animals (volume 1, 2023) to the world of plants.
“The Children of Compost came to see their shared kind as humus, rather than as human or nonhuman”, says Haraway in the introduction to the stories. We propose to explore our shared experience on this Earth from the perspective of the beings that extend their roots and tendrils into humus to begin with – to think about becoming humus and from there becoming with the plants that know it best.
At a time when our understanding of plant life and the vegetal world is being consistently and dramatically reshaped, the invitation is to inhabit the world of these all-but-static beings that surround us. Following the slightly defamiliarizing paths that plants and their rooted beings open for our mobile bodies, Making Kin II Plants wants to forge alliances with these forms of life and the wisdom they can teach us.
Even though every time we try to speak through a non-human voice we have to accept the impossibility of truly inhabiting another being’s vital experience, we can find ways through creative practice to expand the way we sympathize and empathize. Xeno fiction proposes an exercise of placing our imagination, and with it our body, inside another’s perspective.
This open call aimed to convene writers and non-writers that experiment with plant embodiment through literary works.
Deadline
23:59h 18 November 2024
Benefits
Selected stories will be published in-print, in the second volume of the Making Kin series, which will be distributed internationally. Selected authors will be given a full scholarships to one of our seminars during our academic season of 2025. They will also receive a nominal compensation and three copies of the printed publication.
How to submit
Send an email to editorial@instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org with the subject line “MKII XENOFICTION_title of the piece”
Include a sinopsis, proposal, abstract or fragments of a potential or existing story (between 250 and 400 words long).
Please submit your proposal in .docx, .doc, or .odt format.
Please include a short author bio (max. 100 words) in the body of the email.
If your proposal is selected, we will contact you by the end of November, early December to discuss next steps. Full submissions will be expected by early Feb 2025.
We are looking for previously unpublished material or newly formatted work that suits this open call. We are open to multiple publications so long as the material is not identical and suits the proposal specifically.
Cthulhu Books is a bilingual platform, and publishes in English and Spanish. Making Kin II will be in English, with an option to cover the translation costs and to include the original Spanish version in the publication. Please specify your chosen language in the submission email.
Rights
We ask for a brief period of exclusivity (usually one year), and the right to keep the story in print as part of the anthology. We don't ask for more rights than we need to produce our anthologies, or place any limits on what you can do with your story after the exclusivity period. Copyright always remains with the author.