THE NEW JOURNAL OF THEOSOPHICAL, OCCULT, PAGAN AND MAGICKAL STUDIES call for submission

A mouthful, I know, but deliberately so.

As I’ve said in the past, my interest as a creator isn’t just to write my own works and see them published and distributed places. That is part of things, and a very important part to me, but it only serves certain ends. Another part of me wants to collate, curate, and/or publish and promote the works of others that I think personally are cool, worthy of merit, worthy of discussion, things like that. I think, as creators, we have this responsibility to one another; to discuss our influences openly, to promote the works of our peers and contemporaries that we sincerely admire or find inspiring or even just cool, and/or to put up money ourselves to help put out work we would like to see in the world.

Creation, after all, does not exist in a vacuum, and the myth of the “wholly unique and singular imaginative genius” is a pernicious and destructive myth even if a really cool figure to work into or play into on a creative end. It is an ecosystem, and creation itself is part of a larger ecosystem of being, and taking care of that ecosystem is as important an end in and of itself as it is something that winds up benefiting everyone in that ecosystem. (Ideally.)

Basically: The more cool thoughtful shit in the world, the better we all are, the more cool thoughtful shit we are able to make.

In that spirit, I am accepting submissions for a literary magazine called THE NEW JOURNAL FOR THEOSOPHICAL, OCCULT, PAGAN, AND MAGICKAL STUDIES.

What is it? It is a hybrid of a literary magazine and a proper academic journal. I’m not necessarily looking for sincere articles and essays on the practice, mechanics and theorizing of these spaces. But likewise I am disqualifying pieces if they are written sincerely. What matters to me is not whether you the real author of these works sincerely believe in the subject matter you have written, but instead how they might fit together with work of a kind.

What this means is that if you don’t sincerely believe in these things, I will still accept submissions from you. If you conceive of a mad wizard or modern mage or a contemporary post-modern witch or literary theory-informed modern pagan, and you know what kind of “nonfiction” article or essay or praxis paper they might write, I will accept submissions from you. And, given that this is a journal, if you want to respond critically to the work of others as a fellow “scientist” and “academic” of these spaces, I will accept submission from you.

I am not terribly interested in the question of whether the work inside is “real” or reflects reality. I am interested in it feeling and seeming like a real journal concerning these spaces, regardless of the reality of any given piece or contributor.

I care about making this because writers, artists, musicians, etc. since time immemorial have found the spaces of religion and magic and theology and the non-human divine/pagan realm to be fascinating and compelling. It’s a fertile ground for horror, for science fiction, for fantasy, for dabbling and sincere practice, for pseudophilosophy and the foundation for sincere philosophy.

In short, it’s cool, and I and others see something cool in it. I want to present these things to the world in the same way that we perceive them and are inspired and intrigued by them. That’s why I don’t want the magazine to be self-effacing. That’s why I don’t want it to open with an imagination-shuddering disclaimer that “all of these are works of fiction, none of this is real, and none of it can be real.” What I want is to create a magazine, an object, a space, where people suspend their disbelief on entering and then do with what they find there whatever they will.

In this spirit, I will accept work submitted under your real name, but also work attributed in other ways. You may submit under a nom-de-plume, or you may develop a character who is a sincere practitioner or academic and submit under that name, or even multiple characters with antagonistic or convergent or totally unrelated interests and specialties. The more robust this becomes, the more fascinating and rich it will be to others and the more fun it will be to make.

Ideally, this would be published under a Creative Commons license, including all submitted work, in the spirit of providing it as a fertile ground to fellow artists to make and remix and create new, even cooler things from the building blocks as they may. There is the issue of bad faith usages, however, or larger entities that really should be paying artists and smaller publications for aspects they use, though, so I will likely open up the question to those submitting for how best they’d like their work to be handled regarding rights. Personally, I am not interested nor am seeking to own the works of others, nor for this magazine to own the works of others, nor to prohibit artists from reposting or reselling their work elsewhere. I only want the right to publish it in collected form.

Whether this is monthly, quarterly, or non-existent is TBD and will be based on the volume and quality of submissions as well as working out practical concerns, like whether it will be solely digital or have a print component. (Something like this begs for a print component, I feel, and depending on the success of the solicitations, could fare well in the Kickstarter/Patreon/Gofundme environment.)

Obviously, I am not interested in nor seek to publish any work that is found to be oppressive. Racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc. are not welcome. Cases where it is rooted in a fictional author will be handled on a case-by-case basis but will err on the side of “no” rather than “yes;” they are things worth engaging with, even in this space, but as a white cishet dude I doubt I’m the best authority to judge whether they are handled well enough to merit publication in a literary magazine.

I believe in paying artists for their work. I will pay a token payment of $5 and will look to expand this depending on the level of success versus cost.

I will very likely need help editing and designing/laying out this project. Queries regarding that can be sent to the same place as submissions, but please mark in the subject that you are querying and what for.

You can point your submissions to horsecrimes@gmail.com. Please signify that it is a submission by putting SUBMISSION in all-caps at the beginning of the subject, then a colon, then the name of the magazine, then attaching your submission as either a .doc, .docx, or .rtf.*

Example: SUBMISSION: THE NEW JOURNAL

Let’s see how this goes.

*(This is because this is only one of several little zine/magazine ideas I have. Some are one-offs, some are themed collections. I’m curious and excited. Taking a stab at… figuring this space out.)