Chaos and Conviviality (C&C) is a space for thinking through and about social conditions, using reportage, analysis, commentary, and the arts/humanities. Following Saidiya Hartman, we see the "critical," "fabulist," and "speculative" not as escapes or thought exercises, but as tangible tools to amplify the voices of the silenced.

The Call

To this end, C&C is looking for unpublished (including personal sites) Articles, Essays, Illustrations/Drawings/Paintings, Comics, Photos, Poems, (Creative Non-)Fiction, Journal Entries, One-Act Plays, Interviews/Conversations, Reviews (film/tv/music/theater/books/games+), Hybrid forms, and whatever else you can imagine being printed on a page. Please continue reading to see where and how to submit your full drafts (ideal for us), sketches, pitches, excerpts (e.g. a ≤ 500-word section from the work, and a paragraph that explains its place in the whole), or whatever form your work-in-progress takes! Submissions will open June 1 and close June 30, or until we reach capacity.

For everything that's not a full draft, below is a suggested outline—based on 15West's template—for successful pitches.

• Hook/Context: [A striking fact, statistic, or scene that shows why this piece matters now].
• Focus: [Format]¹ on [issue] in [community/area/topic], with a focus on [angle].
  • 1: Format examples: the mediums listed above, acting as explainers, investigations, profiles, analysis, solutions, briefs, features, theory, etc.
• Accountability/Solutions Angle: This story will [verb] how [who] is [addressing or worsening issue], focusing on [key decision‑makers/players] and how the problem [persists or improves] as a result of [specific actions taken or not taken].
• Plan: I'd explore [specific elements you'll examine], [what systems/resources exist or don't], and examine [community impact/voices you'll include].
• What You've Already Done: I've already begun [preliminary research, previous projects], including [sources contacted, research, or connections you've made].
• Timeliness and timelessness: What makes this piece timely - [recent events, upcoming decisions, new data, or ongoing developments]? What makes this piece timeless - [the ways that it goes beyond current events to connect to wider structural/social issues and dynamics]?

Be aware that we are prioritizing full drafts that have obviously been revised. If there's a bunch of typos or craft issues, it's not ready for us; you're better off sending a refined excerpt/pitch/sketch. This prioritization is practical; the more developed the works, the more generative (and less time-crunched) the editing process is.

Whatever you submit, be sure to remove any identifying information from the files. This will enable anonymous review, while still allowing us to put a name to the work later via the submission form. To be clear, we should not see your name/handle anywhere in the name of the document or its content. All we need is the name of the piece as the file name.

Feel free to do simultaneous submissions, unless you're pitching or sending an excerpt. Just make sure that you let us know if you are accepted elsewhere as soon as possible! Given that we are doing a unique submissions process on the backend, failing to mention acceptances makes our lives harder, so we'd appreciate open lines of communication. We'd also appreciate it if you only send us one submission form; if your work has multiple components or is a hybrid piece, we should not get multiple copies of the form from you. Finally, read all of the requirements before submitting. If you don't, we won't be able to consider your work for publication.

The theme for this issue is: CAPTURE. We want work that thinks through what CAPTURE means, especially as it relates to platforms, technology, and industry/the industrial. We're particularly keen on writing from Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, precarious and other marginalized perspectives. CAPTURE gestures towards the frictions at places where things become commodities: like where AI meets the physical world, where data is mined from our cultures, or where the "community" is trapped within the logic of apps and social media. Send us works that are speculative and/or fabulist and/or critical and/or analytical (and/or any combinations you can muster)—that see the puppet strings of CAPTURE and respond with a quick swipe of the blade.

As with many things, CAPTURE can be interpreted expansively; feel free to blow up what "platforms" and "technology" mean, beyond the bounds of the colloquial. "Industrial" immediately calls factories to mind, but it could also be cybergoths, or Rube Goldberg machines, or Deleuzian assemblages. Twist and contort the prompt to your ends; so long as you can explain how it fits, anything goes.

Given our commitments, we are not interested in being restrictive, but we ask that anything submitted is against domination and oppression in all its forms, abstractly and concretely. We don't like bigotry over here.

Structurally, we imagine the issue to be as presented below (in content if not order):

Compensation, Format, and Reciprocity

Each accepted submission receives at least $200, and at most $500.

We pay via Venmo or Cashapp at the time of publication. For those unable to receive payment via Venmo/Cashapp, we will work with you to send compensation in a way that works for you.

These guidelines are firm, with the exception of the length/amount of pieces. However, substantially exceeding (or shooting under) the bounds of your given medium is not a good look.

If we publish your work, be sure to wait until after the next issue releases before submitting again. If you don't want to wait, you can send pitches to us once that system goes live. We want to ensure that we're always giving new folks time to shine, but we would also love to build ongoing relationships with folks.

Alongside this, we are looking for people who'd want to contribute to the (budding) community. To this end, we ask that folks who don't have that interest to search for opportunities elsewhere. To give an example of what this might look like, we imagine that folks could, on the more intensive end, host a workshop or skillshare for the space on one of the skills/gifts that they have (with a hope that accepted folks tend more towards the intensive than the passive). For example, if you know how to file Freedom of Information (FOIA) Requests and you paint, you could host a "FOIA as Art" session for folks. On the lighter end, you might repost the announcement of that same event.

Submission Advice—for Here and Elsewhere

• Read this page closely! It might even be worth it to print it out and highlight keywords related to the submission requirements. People are often rejected not because of their work (though that happens too), but because they opted out of reading the instructions. Don't be one of those folks!
• Do research into the editors: try to discern their worldview, explore their works, and how they talk about their works and the medium more generally. If you submit or suggest things that go against what the folks you're submitting to are advocating for, then you are probably submitting to the wrong place.
• Submit works that resonate with 1) editor tastes and interests, 2) their works, and 3) what you want to create. Standout pieces sit at that intersection while filling a gap in the work that's been published so far.
• Be sure to follow submission procedures!
• For your submission, don't draft it in the submissions portal: copy the questions into another doc, and work on them there! This will make double checking easier and less stressful. Even so, be sure to triple check before you press submit!

Who are the editors for this issue? What are they looking for?

• Dip is the primary contributor to C&C and would love to see a lot of speculative fiction pieces and critical theory-style essays. Send in your stories, yes, but also feel free to do comic strips, book or film or whatever reviews, critical essays on why powerscaling is reactionary, anything! They'd love to engage with it.
• Scooter is the primary operations person and is similarly enthusiastic about speculative fiction; he also loves pieces that are critical of power. Ideally, those pieces are in the context of and in conversation with interviews and other qualitative methods.
• You? For each additional editor-at-large (EAL), we can all review less submissions. Therefore, we'd love the help. If you're down, feel free to reach out to us and/or mark your interest in your submission!

Submissions Form

The embedded form can also be found at https://tally.so/r/dWkpdD

"Rights?"

If C&C publishes a work, the creator can do whatever they want with it after its release date. In other words: all "rights" return to the author. Implied here is that one doesn't publish work in the queue with us elsewhere without letting us know, and that after acceptance is confirmed, they wait until it's published to put it out somewhere else. All we ask is for C&C to be credited in any reprints or resales, with something like "this work was originally published in Chaos and Conviviality" in the dek or at the bottom/description of the work.

If you do republish it, please let us know! If your work ends up in C&C (or not), we want to champion you!

Timeline + Process

• 4 months to review, evaluate, make connections, and build community (Jul1-Oct31)
• 2 months to edit accepted pieces (Nov1-Dec31)
• Finish production (Jan1-Feb1)
• Release (by end of Spring 2027)

1. Submit your work in English, via our submission form. Email us at chaosandconviviality[at]proton[dot]me ([at] = @, [dot] = .) if you run into any issues with submission, or if you have questions!
2. We will review your work in earnest, starting at the end of the submission period (Jul1).
   1. For the first chunk of the period, we will be doing an anonymous review. At the end of this round, we will have a longlist. For this and subsequent rounds, rejections will be un-anonymized for the sake of communications.
   2. For the second round, we will do another anonymous review, with more specificity in the rubric. At the end of this round, we will have a shortlist.
   3. For the third round, we will do a more exacting anonymous review, to pick the finalists. The finalists will be un-anonymized.
   4. For the fourth round, we will rank the finalists, to select who will be in the issue.
3. During this entire period, we will be working to act as a bridge between submitters, in an attempt to turn what is often a competition into something more collaborative. This will involve a combination of making direct introductions, facilitating programming related to the community's interests, and other events that help build community.
4. Creators will be notified if their work is accepted or rejected (by Oct31).
5. For the last leg of the year, creators will collaborate with editors to refine and hone their pieces for production.
6. The issue will be finished, folks will be notified, and everyone will make a big deal about it (by Feb1).
7. Production will start, with the issue coming out by the end of Spring 2027!

Why do it like this?

The Benefits: if we are able to do it well, everyone will gain something from this process. Mainly, a radical, craft-oriented (i.e., folks who wanna make good stuff) creative community, built on mutual aid and solidarity. This could bloom into a bunch of different things; as an example, there could be groups of people in the same locale who start attending zine fests together, building up their rapport.

The Drawbacks: it'll be a while before folks hear about their acceptances. Alongside this, given that payment will occur upon publication, this is not the pathway to make money quickly. If folks need more support, feel free to reach out, and we will amplify any aid requests!

There's also the question of labor from the EALs. Given that it's more horizonal, everyone is playing the role of readers and editors (and event coordinators and more), alongside having a more dialogue-based editorial process with accepted submissions. This might be new to a lot of folks. It's asking for a substantiative and substantial volunteer effort. We are working to make this doable for different schedules, but it’s something that’ll be frequently revisited.

Final Notes

If you think your work needs a content warning, be sure to include it in your submission.  

If we accept a piece, we see that as a big moment in a relatively extended conversation. The process for editing will be engaging and collaborative, rooted in building mutual relationships rather than trying to operate like a gatekeeping institution. Creatives: feel free to challenge edits, push back against suggestions, and ask questions.

Finally, we want this to be something that as many (marginalized) people can have ownership of as possible. If you aren't able to submit (and even if you are), feel free to share this with anyone you think would want to be a part of this project. Of course, signing up and following C&C is a great way to keep us in your thoughts and build a relationship. Good luck, and we're excited to engage with your work!