Wilderness Interface Zone – A Motley Vision

Love of Nature Nature of Love Month on Wilderness Interface Zone

During February, Wilderness Interface Zone is launching its traditional month-long celebration of love and the natural world, Love of Nature Nature of Love Month.

To that end, we’re issuing an open call for nature-themed, love-laced writing and visual arts: original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the subject of love while referencing nature, even if lightly. By the same token, we’re interested in nature writing raveled up with themes of love.

If you’ve written artsy Valentine wishes to someone beloved–or perhaps created a video Valentine or made a live reading of a sonnet or lyric poem that’s original to you–or if you’ve written a short essay avowing your love for people, critters, or spaces that make you feel alive, please consider sending it to WIZ. Click here for submissions guidelines.

We hope you’ll join our month-long celebration combining two of the most potent natural forces on the face of the planet: love and language.

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: LONNOL Month on WIZ

Got messages of deep feeling you’d like to send someone, or maybe to the world at large? Starting February 1st, Wilderness Interface Zone will launch its traditional month-long celebration of love and the natural world, Love of Nature Nature of Love Month.

We’re issuing a call for nature-themed love stuff: original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature. We’ll take the other side of the coin of affection, too: We’ll publish work about nature spun up with themes of love.

If you have a sweet song or sonnet you’ve written to someone beloved”“or perhaps a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for people, natural critters or spaces near and dear”“please consider sending it to WIZ. Click here for submissions guidelines.

Our fondest hopes for LONNOL Month: Putting into the currents of language flowing around the world some of the deepest, most passionate, freeze-thawingest words that we can find. And if things work out, we’ll also be running one of WIZ’s DVD giveaways, a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring loincloth-clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll join our month-long celebration combining two of the most potent natural forces on the face of the planet–love and language.

Voting has begun for WIZ’s 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff

Over at AMV’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone, the last of the 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff poems have posted and voting to decide which one wins the 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award is open and will run through Tuesday, June 5th. All participating poets, their friends and family, and all connoisseurs of poetry–particularly, of nature poetry–are invited to help choose the 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award winner.

The poll to determine the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Popular Poem Award will close 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, June 5, but winners of both the popular vote and the Admin Award will be announced on or around Tuesday, June 6th. So keep an eye on WIZ to see how matters settle out. 31 poems qualified for the voting, so pop some popcorn, get out a pint of your favorite ice cream, or otherwise provision yourself for a long (but satisfying!) read. This part is important, folks: Each voter can (and should) vote for his or her three favorite poems! Instructions on how to access the poems are available in the post”“please read all instructions carefully.

To read the voting instructions and to vote, click here.

The winners of the Most Popular Poem and Admin Awards will receive their choices of Steven L. Peck’s The Scholar of Moab (Torrey House Press 2011), which recently received the AML Award for the Novel, or the stunning new anthology of Mormon poetry, Fire in the Pasture (Peculiar Pages 2011) edited by AMV’s Tyler Chadwick. Tyler also won an AML Award for his editing of this must-have collection.

So come over to WIZ and join the fun. Or at least set up a lawn chair and watch.

WIZ’s 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff Competition and Celebration is underway

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Wilderness Interface Zone’s 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff Competition and Celebration opened its post pages for spring-themed poetry on March 26. Please come join the fun, either by submitting your best vernal verse in competition or non-competition categories or by reading and voting for your favorite poems. Prizes will be awarded for the Most Popular Poem and for an Admin Award. WIZ will also have other activities for fun and enjoyment, including its customary haiku chain and a WIZ Retro Review giveaway to interested participants of an old-timey movie, Come Next Spring–an intelligent flick about second chances.

If you’d like to add your poetry to the flow, please go here and read the rules.

Call for submissions: It’s LONNOL Month on WIZ

Love of Nature Nature of Love Month has arrived on Wilderness Interface Zone, and we’re looking to publish love abroad. Do you have a message of friendship and love you’d like to send someone? WIZ is looking for original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the topic of amour while making references to nature. We’ll also take the flipside: We’ll publish work about nature intertwined with themes of love. Besides original work you’re welcome to send favorite works by others that have entered public domain. So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to a wild thing of one species or another or perhaps you’ve composed a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space near and dear, please consider sending it to WIZ. Click here for submissions guidelines.

Besides rolling out a (hopefully) plush carpet of love-art, we’ll also be running two WIZ, nature-laced, romantic DVD giveaways, Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour and pre-Music Man Robert Preston, and a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring scantily clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll attend the month-long celebration. Come join us at WIZ and help thaw out February.

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.

Voting begins for WIZ’s 2011 Spring Runoff Most Popular Poem Award

Over at AMV’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone, our 6 and 1/2 weeks of Spring Poetry Runoff have finished. The last poems have posted and voting to decide which one wins the 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award runs through Saturday, May 14th. Participating poets, please come vote, and let your friends and family members know about the voting, too. Everyone is invited to participate in choosing the Spring Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award winner.

Profuse thanks to all the fine poets who contributed to the Spring Poetry Runoff, not only for participating beautifully but also for exceeding (once again) my expectations for the number, quality, and wide-ranging nature of poems submitted. There really was a great turnout of celebrants and a beguiling show of high-quality verse. And a shout out to Carla Martin-Wood and my son Saul, who provided pix to brighten up the site for everyone.

The poll to determine the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Popular Poem Award will close Saturday, May 14, but winners of both the popular vote and the Admin Award will be announced on or around Monday, May 16th. So keep an eye on WIZ to see how matters settle out. Also, grab your fav’rit munchies. Twenty-five poems qualified for the voting, any one of which can cause you to linger longer. Also: To ease the discomfort of exercising your agency in a veritable candy store of choices, each voter can vote for his or her three favorite poems! Instructions on how to access the poems are available in the post”“please read all instructions carefully.

To vote, click here.

The winner of the Most Popular Poem Award and the winner of the Admin Award will receive their choices of Mark Bennion’s Song and Selah: A Poetic Journey Through The Book Of Mormon (Bentley Enterprises 2009), A Metaphorical God: Poems ( Persea 2008) by Kimberly Johnson, or The Clearing (Texas Tech University Press 2007) by Philip White.

WIZ’s 2nd Annual Spring Poetry Runoff opens for submissions

The Vernal Equinox arrives Sunday, March 20. To celebrate spring’s arrival last year, Wilderness Interface Zone ran a Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration that had fantastic participation–a veritable cascade of sparkling poesy–and was lots of fun, too. So beginning March 20, WIZ is running its Second Annual Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration!

In keeping with WIZ’s mission to help develop, inspire, and promote literary nature and science writing in the Mormon writing community, we encourage poets to help call an end to winter and sing up a season of flower and vegetable gardens, returning flocks, and light that takes the tarnish off the blood.

To view contest rules and submission deadlines, go here.

The contest will run from March 20 through April 8 or longer, if enough poems come in to warrant extending the contest. All submissions will be published on the blog, where they’ll become automatically eligible for competition as well as open to readers’ informal feedback in post comments. Authors retain all rights to their work.

Following the contest’s closing, readers will vote on WIZ to choose the winning poem in the Most Popular Vote Award category. We will also offer an Admin Award to a second poet whose poem is chosen by blog administrators.

Winners will be announced within a week after the last poem has been posted and all votes have been cast. The winners of the Most Popular Vote Award and the Admin Award will be given his or her choice of Mark Bennion’s Psalm and Selah: A Poetic Journey Through The Book Of Mormon (Bentley Enterprises 2009), A Metaphorical God: Poems ( Persea 2008) by Kimberly Johnson, or The Clearing (Texas Tech University Press 2007) by Philip White.

So, if you have written a poem which mentions spring or one in which spring figures prominently and that fits WIZ’s themes and content, e-mail it to us at wilderness@motleyvision.org or pk.wizadmin@gmail.com. Please review our submissions guide before submitting.

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.