Rivers: Essays on Form and Water - Anthology Submissions Call


  • “How can we speak in metaphor when we need the river to be seen as literal?” - Elissa Washuta

  • Description:

  • The editors invite you to submit short-form essays (around 500-1000wds) centering on the writer’s experience with rivers–experiences can be of a particular river, or multiple. We are looking for writing that is strongly rooted in place and that opens up into an exploration of form in writing. Questions you might consider: how does your particular experience with/of/alongside a river inform your understanding of form in writing, whether that be the sentence, the line, the paragraph, the stanza, the comma, etc? Hybridity is welcome, lyricism is welcome. We welcome submissions from writers/artists of all genres. We hope to see pieces written directly responding to our hybrid prompt that calls for both attention to environment and to writerly craft (by this, we mean the form language takes, its shape and many terms). Our aim is to bring together a variety of voices, from different geographical, class, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds; we want to assemble different choruses of voices on rivers, rather than one kind of sound. We encourage writers to think capaciously about rivers and water, and the many topics rivers intersect with, among them: childhood, labor, love, home and belonging, Indigenous land, borders and immigration, transit and travel, climate change and conservation, death and disaster, life and rebirth, human ritual and rites, queerness, and more.

  • Note on identity: both of our editors come from rural, Southern backgrounds, and their self-identifications include chronic pain/trauma history, LGBTQIA+, and neurodivergence.

  • Guest editor: TBA

  • Titles inspiring and orienting our call:

  • Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton (University of Washington Press, 2019)
  • A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press, 2011), edited by Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee
  • The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination by Carl Phillips (Graywolf Press, 2014)
  • Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions, 2013)
  • The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, edited by Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider (Pleiades Press, 2018)
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