Wilderness Inerface Zone call for submissions

Wilderness Interface Zone: Call for submissions

Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature-themed prose: creative nonfiction or environmental nonfiction, eco-criticism, interviews, hybrid literary forms, and short fiction, including novel excepts, that reflect on your relationship to the natural world, wherever you engage it.

We’re especially interested in writing that demonstrates the need for and effects of what I call “green language””“rhetorical prowess that taps into the fertile realm of language’s most vital energies. One of WIZ’s foremost goals is to advocate for better behavior in the teeming yet at-risk environment of human language.

Please consider sending your work to Wilderness Interface Zone. Before submitting your writing, please read our About and Submissions pages.

AND poets, please continue sending your poetry. WIZ loves poetry!

ALSO, in the past,WIZ has launched its Spring Poetry Runoff, an annual, themed poetry competition celebrating spring’s highly anticipated arrival. This year, Jonathon and I have chosen not to run the Runoff. We’ll bring it back in 2014 in new and improved form. But we will host an informal spring fling featuring poetry and prose that revels in the arrival of warmer and brighter days, the annual emergence of life, and onset of spring migrations that change life’s scenery.

Spring arrives early on March 20. Feel free to add a streamer to WIZ’s literary maypole. Even if your poem, essay, short story or novel excerpt merely mentions spring and nature, please consider submitting it to the festivities.

Call for submissions at WIZ

AMV’s sister site Wilderness Interface Zone is searching for longer forms.

While WIZ loves poetry and heartily encourages poets to continue sending their nature-romancing verse, it’s perhaps time to follow nature’s own example of protean morphologies and bring more rhetorical diversity to WIZ’s environs. WIZ is issuing a call for short, creative non-fiction and fiction pieces for publication on its site. If you have a nature-oriented essay or field notes that run between 500 and 1300 words, please consider sending them to WIZ. Longer essays will be considered if they can be divided into parts.

Nature-based flash fiction or short stories running between 100 and 1300 words are also welcome; longer pieces that can be serialized up to four or five parts will be considered also. Excerpts from longer stories or novels up to 1300 words are encouraged”“though pieces may run longer if they can be broken into multiple parts.

If you have written up adventures in the garden or the wilds or have a story that features a scary white whale or incorrigible pocket gopher, or even bees sleeping on flowers in a garden, please consider sending it. Fiction not directly about nature but whose drama unfolds against nature’s backdrop are encouraged. Please read WIZ’s submissions guide before sending your work. Then electronically submit your work either to wilderness@motleyvision.org or to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com. International submissions and submissions from nature writers who are not Mormon but are comfortable interfacing with Mormons are welcome.

February is Love of Nature, Nature of Love Month on WIZ

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For the second year, we’re making February “Love of Nature, Nature of Love” month over at Wilderness Interface Zone. To celebrate Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll publish poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), video or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature. Or it could go the other way around: We’ll publish work about nature that also happens to give a nod to love. That presents a wide field of possibilities. We’re seeking submissions of original work or you can also send favorite works by other artists that have entered public domain.

Compare someone to a summer’s day. Or maybe you’ve never seen a sight so lovely as a tree. If you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart”“even and perhaps especially your dog”“please consider sending it to WIZ. See our submissions guidelines.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday. We’ll be two years old–we’ve made it to toddlerhood without doing something unfortunate like sticking our tongues into electrical outlets. To celebrate, a couple of posts will offer presents to our readers. Because without you, dear readers, where would we be?

There’s more than a slight hint of thaw in the air. The light is growing longer. The first waves of migrating Canadian geese have begun rolling through San Juan County. Hen-and-chicks and stork’s bill are beginning to preen. The coyotes are pairing off. February is a good month to warm things up. Come over and toss a log of love on the fire at WIZ.

Poems of Biblical Proportions Week at Wilderness Interface Zone

The intertwining of spirituality with images, metaphors, analogies, parables and other language containing strong veins of agrarian- and wilderness-oriented content is part of what gives scripture its power. Along with a large proportion of the rest of this Bible-reading country, as Mormons increasingly move inside and explore via the electronic frontier, scripture becomes one of the few places where folks might encounter nature with some constancy.

Of course, one problem that arises from the general nature-human disconnect is that of faltering literacy. Lacking their own spirituality-nature approach, some readers of scripture find the outdoorsy contexts and nature-hued saturation levels of many scriptural stories and passages mysterious and obscure, or maybe quaint and thick, rather like how the King James version of the Bible loses some students of scripture with its Shakespearean-era rhetorical density.

Wilderness Interface Zone is nothing if not interested in promoting literacy, especially nature-literacy. So to honor and enjoy scripture’s endearing and enduring traditional affinities with nature and to encourage folks to throw themselves into experience with nature–even just parks, with trees, grass, ducks, and space to fly kites–to improve their scriptural literacy, we’re running Poems of Biblical Proportions Week. WIZ is soliciting poetry (or even poetic creative nonfiction) based in both scripture and nature. Mp3s of music combining nature and scriptural themes are also of interest. Your work need not be based in the Bible only. It may reference any scriptural source, such as the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, etc.

To submit a poem, creative non-fiction essay, mp3, or other poetry-like venture containing both scriptural and natural wavelengths, see our guidelines here.