Now open for REVOLUTIONARY FORMS, our spring web issue!

At Hayden’s Ferry Review, we are committed to publishing the best literature out there, regardless of genre. This year we are taking a big leap and opening our inboxes to hybrid work! This special online issue, titled "Revolutionary Forms," will be published in Spring of 2022 on The Dock—the online feature of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

For this call, we want to support writers whose work does not conform to traditional genre prescriptions. What do we mean by hybrid? We envision hybrid work as art that reconfigures the possibilities of language, of constructing meaning, texture, form, and narrative through a multi-genre, multimodal lens.

Award-winning writer Katie Farris describes hybrid forms as what allow the impossible to occur, to become possible. She continues: “Hybrid forms give us new ways to think and engage; they are specialty tools like the aye-aye’s crazy-long finger, formed to pull insect larva out of tree bark. They are investigative forms, revolutionary forms. They nourish what is strange in us.”

We are looking for work that pushes the boundaries of what language can do, and are particularly interested in centering works from BIPOC, trans, nonbinary, disabled, and other marginalized writers and artists who may embrace such alternative modes of expression to reimagine, recreate, subvert, and defy definition, boundary, possibility. 

We want work that leans into its strangeness to access truth and provoke change. That investigates with a curious, free-spirited, disciplined eye. That makes us think and engage in unexpected, groundbreaking ways. That revolutionizes what we expect writing to be, look like, feel like. We want to see work that uses techniques and technologies of different genres and art-making processes to propel its meaning and emotional tenor to new heights, but that still maintains language as primary material. 

We are inspired by the work of Diana Khoi Nguyen, Claudia Rankine, Vanessa Angélica Villareal, Renee Gladman, Don Mee Choi, Carolina Ebeid, Sarah J. Sloat, avery r. young, Layli Long Soldier, and Michael Martone, to name a few.

We are excited to see pieces that use and manipulate language to experiment, unravel, and challenge us to perceive text in a new light. We are looking for revolutionary pieces that question our understanding of language and subvert the structures of power in writing, publishing, and art. We want your most radical fever dreams.

The work we are looking for could be:

·  comics / graphic art

·  visual and concrete poems

·  asemic writing

·  video poems and essays

·  image-text works (photo essays, for example)

·  sound-based pieces (recordings, for example)

·  nonfiction about making hybrid work

·  pieces with animation or other new online technology (coded poems, for example)

·  collaborative work that blurs lines of genre and authorship

·  interviews of artists that identify their work as hybrid

Collaborative pieces, multilingual work, and translations are highly encouraged.

Unsure if your work fits this call? Please contact us before submitting: haydensferryreview@gmail.com

There is no submission fee, and we will be open for submissions February 15 - March 15, 2022. You must submit on our Submittable page. Simultaneous submissions are accepted as long as you let us know if it is accepted elsewhere. To do so, send us a message via Submittable. Please include a short cover letter and bio with your submission. If there is any content that may be harmful to experience (i.e., deals with sexual assault, violence, discrimination, abuse of any kind, etc.), please include a content warning in your cover letter. If you’re wondering whether your submission needs a content warning or not, we ask that you include it, and appreciate your understanding. You will hear back from us by mid-April.

We will not tolerate any work that is discriminatory and offensive. Any piece that is racist, homophobic, ableist, xenophobic, ageist, or uses any other kind of oppressive language or ideas will be automatically rejected.

Submission Details:

Video: Up to 10 minutes long.

Writing: Up to 20 pages, enumerated.

Images: No more than 10 images. Up to 20 mb and 120 mp.

File type: If Submittable supports it, you can use it! We recommend using PDF for writing-heavy work to avoid changes to your formatting.