Submissions for Bomb Cyclone are currently closed.

Call for Submissions: Special Audio Issue

Bomb Cyclone—an online journal of ecopoetics, inter- and anti-genre literature, and mixed media art—seeks submissions for our fifth installment, a special issue highlighting sound and silence in contemporary ecopoetics.

Since its publication in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—a polemical study of pesticides’ impact on ecosystems—has been a foundational text for the American conservation movement. Also since then, songbirds and honeybees have quickly (on a human time scale) become harbingers of greater silence to come. Casualties of habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, and pollution caused by capitalist processes such as globalization, suburban development, and agribusiness continue to mount.

As global biodiversity becomes increasingly threatened by human actions justified through anthropocentrism—or, the belief in human exceptionalism: excluding our past, present, and future survival from Nature—audio becomes a vital tool for documentation and conservation. When we begin to listen closely, to witness silence, we begin to feel these losses and their implications for our interconnected lives.

Submission Guidelines

For this special issue, Bomb Cyclone welcomes submissions in playable audio and video, performance and durational media, and sound visualizations. Our goal is not merely to feature textual/visual work with supplemental audio clips of published artists performing; rather, we aim to decenter visuality/textuality and promote close listening as ecocritical praxis. We encourage readers to submit new sound-based media—which will be considered first for the purposes of screening—along with textual or visual “transcriptions.”

For the purposes of this special issue, work previously published in text or featured online in playable sound-based form will be considered ineligible unless significantly transformed in recording; we will consider previously performed work, provided no audio or video recording of the work has been previously published online.

Please submit up to five mp3 or mp4 files, making sure to include transcription(s) of the audio project(s) in a single text document (docx or pdf). Email submissions to bombcycloneliterary at gmail dot com with your name in the subject line. Include a brief cover letter and artist bio (no more than 50 words) in the body of your email.

We do not charge a submission fee.

We encourage simultaneous submissions, but please let us know immediately if you need to withdraw any pieces that have been accepted elsewhere. To withdraw your work, simply reply to your original submission email stating which pieces are to be withdrawn.

Due to the volume of submissions we receive in our open reading period and time constraints on our volunteer staff, please wait at least two weeks after the submission deadline before sending inquiries. We cannot consider multiple submissions per reading period from the same artist.

Rights

We ask for first American publication rights including electronic rights; this means that Bomb Cyclone will have exclusive rights to exhibit accepted work online. Upon publication, all rights revert to the creator. Any future online or print publications should acknowledge that the work was previously published in Bomb Cyclone.