SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Duende will open in June 2020 for submissions to our Ritual Issue (see below).
RITUAL
The rituals where the writing
occurs are capable of connecting
us to all consciously enacted
ritualistic behavior from the
past and future.
To me it is the opposite of time
travel, it is the halting of
time, it is the collapsing of the
walls separating us from where we
have been, where we are going,
and beyond.
-CAConrad, from Poetry and Ritual, an essay in verse
When the editors decided to read for an issue focused on Ritual, we could scarcely have imagined the extent to which the rituals of our lives would be disrupted, or rearranged, because of the Covid-19 outbreak. We are now dealing with more than a loss-state, a grief-state. We have been forced into a new way of being—and as writers and artists, we need to respond to and examine these shifting rituals.
With that in mind, we envision this curated space to be one of:
• Mourning for the rituals we lost;
• Celebration for the rituals established;
• Examination of the mystic chords that continue to bind us as human beings;
• Eco-ritual--both the ancient and new rituals;
• Ritual-futurism--or the rituals we imagine our future will contain;
• Labor rituals and the loss of the labor rituals;
• Human contact as ritual, the loss of human contact as new ritual;
• Rites--both in the spiritual-sense and social-sense;
• Observance; and quite simply
• What we do.
Please send us your best visual art, poetry, fiction, hybrid and nonfiction work on this theme between June 1 – June 30.
We’re very excited to see how writers will respond to this emergent theme and share in the collective ritual of making.
As always, we remain open to submissions of visual art year-round.
Duende welcomes submissions of prose, poetry, hybrid writing, stage plays, screenplays and visual art. We are especially interested in collaborations between two or more writers, or between writers and visual artists. We accept submissions from writers working in English, or translating into English, from anywhere in the world.
Duende tastes good on the tongue and caresses the ear. Duende seeks authenticity & soulfulness, earthiness & expressiveness, a chill up the spine. It encompasses darkness and intensity; elicits sorrow and joy; wrests a response from the body.
If your poems are rough-cut diamonds, slightly off-kilter; if your fiction will make us feel more human and less alone; if you enjoy exploration of new forms at the edges of the literary universe; if you can bring us elegant translations of literature from far corners of the globe; if your nonfiction is wild and honest; if your visual art is raw and earnest…show us. We want to see it.
Duende aspires to represent the true beauty and diversity of the U.S. literary ecosystem. A majority of the work we publish will be from writers and artists who are queer, of color, differently abled, immigrant, working class, youth, elder, and / or otherwise from communities underrepresented in U.S. literary magazines and journals. Please send us your work!
Please follow our link to Submittable to send us your work.
GENRE SPECIFICATIONS:
Poetry: Duende welcomes all forms: sonnets to prose poems, villanelles to visual, sestinas to Surrealist. If your poetry fits a particular style or form, great. If it doesn’t, also great. Make us weep. Make us hysterical. Make us walk the earth in different shoes. To paraphrase Federico García Lorca, we seek poems that “bring the poet face-to-face with death.” Poems that enlighten, challenge, innovate, or tell stories—we’re interested in all of it. If your work balances that beautiful line between prose and poetry, please submit it as hybrid work.
Prose: Duende wants stories—whether real or imagined, or somewhere in between—that engage, move, challenge, thrill. We seek character-driven stories where things happen and people change. Stories with heart, that make us both laugh and cry. Weird stories that make us feel more human and less alone. Be earnest; be complicated; be honest. Please submit your prose under fiction, or nonfiction, or if it’s somewhere in the middle, as hybrid work. While we’re interested in writing that lies somewhat outside the realist vein, we seek work that situates itself first and foremost as literary.
Translations: please include the source language text and confirm that you have the author’s permission to translate and publish the text in English.
Visual art and collaborations: as with prose and poetry, we seek work that exemplifies the spirit of duende. As Lorca wrote in 1933, “Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles….” Art with duende “is rooted in our soil, full of thistles and sharp stones.”
We understand that as a visual artist, publication in a literary journal doesn’t further one’s career as much as it does for writers. In the interests of supporting our artists, we are happy to include in your biography links to your web site and/or social media outlets, thereby encouraging publicity.
THIRTEEN BRASS TACKS:
1) We accept only these file formats for writing: doc, docx, and pdf. And for images: jpg or png. If you are concerned about formatting changes when your files are opened on different computers, please submit PDFs.
2) We ask you to send work in only one genre—considering “hybrid work” to be its own genre—per submission. Please place your submission into one file. (That is to say, if you are submitting five poems, then send them all in one document. If you are sending two poems and one short story, you must submit twice, once in each genre. If you are submitting translations of three short stories, please place both the short stories and the original texts in one file. Label clearly, in English, the source texts.)
3) We consider up to five poems at a time, with a combined total of no more than 15 pages; hybrid work of no more than 2,500 words; and prose no more than 7,500 words. Please send no more than five images at a time. For prose and hybrid work, feel free to send several pieces, up to those total word lengths. There are no minimum lengths; we love pithiness.
4) Poetry should be single spaced; all prose should be double-spaced.
5) All submissions must be made via Submittable, no exceptions.
6) We do accept simultaneous submissions. However, kindly drop us a message if your work is accepted elsewhere. Also, please respect our time and do not submit if you would rather be published elsewhere. It is a bummer accepting work, only to have it later withdrawn when an author is accepted by a more prestigious journal.
7) We do not consider submissions outside of our submissions windows.
8) We’d love to hear why you have chosen to submit to Duende—we love to make new friends—and how you heard about us. Please send us a short bio, but know that, for us, it’s all about the writing.
9) Submitting to Duende is free. We are grateful for the opportunity to review your work.
10) Unfortunately, we are unable to offer payment for the work we publish. You will have our eternal gratitude!
11) We seek previously unpublished (including online) work only. You maintain all rights to your work; we ask only the right to keep your work on our website indefinitely and perhaps, eventually, the right to publish a broadside or anthology. We do accept visual art that has been posted on Facebook, Instagram, and the artist's personal web site. Please do not submit work published online or in print outside of these outlets.
12) Duende is a group of full-time undergraduate students, all volunteers, who live all over the United States. Our academic schedule is non-traditional and we meet face-to-face only once during each semester. Please be patient with us. We might need up to four months to reply to your submission. If you haven’t heard from us in four months, please do drop us an email and check in. Thank you!
13) We do not accept submissions from current Goddard College students, faculty, or staff. If you left Goddard at least a year ago, please do submit!