Submission Guidelines and About the Journal of Radical Wonder — WE ARE NOT ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS RIGHT NOW!!
Welcome to The Journal of Radical Wonder.
WE ARE ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS RIGHT NOW!!!
The world and the universe is extraordinary, every part of it, every moment of it. To see a portion of it as dull or to adopt the childish philosophy of cynicism in order to seem clever is to misunderstand what the world is. If you witness the earth as it truly is, you will protect it and all of its inhabitants.
We are moved by the philosophy of Kendall Johnson, one of our editors, who says hope is often unrealistic but also the only strategy that has ever worked.
We are moved by meaning and purpose and joy.
We are looking for writing and art that helps us to understand the complex layers of wonder that can fill our lives.
We are looking for short form prose including creative nonfiction, flash fiction, microfiction and other forms.
We are looking for poetry especially ekphrasis and nature poetry, but certainly not limited to that. Reveal truths about relationships and other forms of hope.
We are looking for reviews of plays, books, movies, music, art, and more. Try to get beyond simple thumbs up or thumbs down evaluation. If you didn’t like something, please don’t send that review to us. There are other magazines for negative reviews. Good magazines. Send us a review that helps us to understand the piece you are reviewing in a more complex way.
Send us your art and photography. Spark wonder in us. Show us how to look. We’re not interested in saccharin simplicity, however.
Joy is complex and goes beyond word packages and clichés.
Radical wonder does not need to be happy. It can explore the tragic and real darkness with meaning. It need not look outward. It can look inward.
To have radical wonder is to have the courage to look pathos in the eye.
Change the way that we see and understand some aspect of the world so that we gain the richness of your insight.
The mission of this literary and arts magazine is to fight against the idea of banality. Hannah Arendt wrote that one of the great lessons of the Holocaust was about the banality of evil, that great evil can occur when it becomes an everyday part of a person’s process. We agree with that, and extend the idea a bit. Seeing the world through a lens of banality is the first act of evil.
What I, John Brantingham, assume is that I have been wrong about life in the past, and I will be wrong in the future. Your insight will get me closer to wisdom, and I want that. Send us those pieces.
BEFORE YOU CAN SUBMIT, WE HAVE TO ADD YOU AS A WRITER. You will need to have a medium.com subscription to submit. You can get a free one. If you would like to write for us, send your medium handle (not your actual name but the handle which begins with an “@”) to my email address (johnmbrantingham@gmail.com), along with a quick hello and what you would like to write about generally. You don’t need to pitch a particular story. I’ll add you if you are writing what we write, and then you can give me a story in draft form.
Free medium.com subscription link.
How to submit a draft to our publication link .
Simultaneous submissions are welcome and encouraged. Let us know IMMEDIATELY if your work is published elsewhere. We’re pretty fast in responding, but we’re also human.
Reprints are also all right as long as you have the rights!
Submit your work AS A DRAFT.
Include the tag “Radical Wonder”
WHAT TO SUBMIT:
- Flash Fiction and Flash Nonfiction (1000 words or fewer)
- Interviews
- Book Reviews.
- Poetry.
- Visual Arts and Performing Arts (accompanied with a contextualizing essay or statement of 100–1000 words). Please include your copyright info (full name and year) and permission to use.
- Single images to pair with other people’s written submissions. For specifications on image size, follow this link. Please include your copyright info (full name and year) and permission to use.
- Digital recordings of music, poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. No longer than 10 minutes. For specifications on recording information follow this link. Please include your copyright info (full name and year) and permission to use.
Please, include a 50 word 3rd person biography!
Upon publication, all rights revert back to you.
We don’t have a paid subscription, but if you would like to support us, please sign up for Medium.com. That brings us revenue and gives you greater access.
Meet the Staff
Jane Edberg, Arts Editor & Editor-at-Large
Jane Edberg has recently completed an illustrated memoir called The Fine Art of Grieving. She writes memoir, flash, poetry, and writes book reviews. Her work has been featured in Death and its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Beautiful Lessons, Cholla Needles, Worthing Flash, Gyroscope Review, and BAM 42 Stories Anthology. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay’s OLLI Program. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook @thefineartofgrieving, and at https://www.janeedberg.com/
Watch this interview of Jane Edberg on Curiosity Invited with David Bryan: The Fine Art of Grieving
Jane is looking for writing and art deep enough to dredge despair, that reaches into the thickest tangle of self-doubt, and elicits confidence. Even joy. Writing and art able to resuscitate life, breathe into what remains, make a clearing for change, and acceptance. Brings on a sense of belonging. Or might acknowledge the everyday hero. Writing and art that recognizes human fragility. Bold writing, and beautiful art that reveals love and compassion in the worst of situations. Poems, memoir, short stories, flash, ekphrastic writing, experimental work, and asemic writing. Art: two dimensional, and three dimensional, as well as experimental.
Kate Flannery, Editor-at-Large
Kate Flannery is an Editor-at-Large for The Journal of Radical Wonder. She lives in a small college town where she also practices law. Her essays, poetry and fiction have been published in Chiron Review, Emerge, Shark Reef, Ekphrastic Review, and Pure Slush as well as other literary journals. She works regularly with the Sasse Museum, in Pomona California and has contributed to exhibition catalogs for the museum as well as writing ekphrastic poetry to the artwork on display there. Her writing for the museum has been featured in The Torso Project, Photography Past and Present, Icons, Nudes, and 14 Stations, among other Sasse publications. She is currently working on a curated volume about Palmer Canyon after the Grand Prix Fire of 2003.
Much of her work at The Journal of Radical Wonder will be focused on its bi-weekly column, “Interludes.” An interlude is a space, or place, between two settled pieces or sections of a larger work (musical, dramatic, etc). It is often transitional, a bridge between what has come before and what is coming next. At its best, an interlude provides relief from the action, a time and space for reflection.
Kate looks forward to reading the work of other writers who can contribute their own stories to JORW about transformative interludes in their lives.
Ann Brantingham, Artist
Ann Brantingham is a nature artist focusing on local flora and fauna. She teaches art at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Her work, featured at the dA Center for the Arts, The Sasse Museum, and the Progress Gallery, explores leaves and other natural elements in graphite on a small scale in order to experience the physicality of a branch or single leaf. Her hope is that through experiencing the environment around them, people will see that we have more similarities than differences and that through nature, we can find our peace. You can see her work at annbrantingham.com and https://society6.com/annbrantingham.
John Brantingham, General Editor
John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including The L.A. Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press), Crossing the High Sierra (Cholla Needles Press), and California Continuum: Migrations and Amalgamations (Pelekinesis Press) co-written with Grant Hier. His newest work is Life, Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He is a staff reviewer for Cultural Daily. He was a professor at Mt. San Antonio College for 25 years, where he directed the creative writing program. He lives in Jamestown, New York.
You can find out more about him and buy his books here: https://www.johnbrantingham.com/
