OPEN CALL: EXOPHONY

We are now accepting submissions for our 10th issue, themed Exophony.

Open Call Description:

Exophony is commonly described as the practice of writing in a language other than your mother tongue. When we write in a language that we were not nurtured within, what do we say? What can we put into words, that we cannot in another language? Can we be more honest? More courageous? Or are we hiding? Obscuring ourselves more deeply? 

If you write in multiple languages, how does your voice change from one to another and another and another? What languages do you have? What languages do you lack? Is language something we can ever possess? Does a mother tongue even exist? 

Cultural imperialism, migration, war, family, and our personal choices may inform our linguistic realities. This open call invites writers who creatively express themselves in a language that they or others may not consider to be their “mother tongue.” Simultaneously, this open call invites you to investigate the boundaries of language, perhaps even contending that a mother tongue does not exist in the first place.

The bounds of this open call are murky, because language is murky. 

Here’s what we can say for certain: we’re interested in work that obscures and subverts language. We encourage multilingual work, work that breaks syntactical rules, that is erroneous of grammar and punctuation. You can submit work that reflects on your relationship to language, but you can also submit work that demonstrates your language(s) in its/their idiosyncratic form. We invite you to be creative, genre-b(l)ending, and imperfect in your submissions.

We encourage submissions in ALL languages—Arabic, English, computer languages, private languages, invented languages, and beyond. We also hope you’ll take the theme and interpret it openly and curiously.

Logistical Information:

• Final form: Pieces published on Unootha’s website 

• Deadline: 1st of February 2025, 11:59 PM UAE time.

• Limits: You can submit up to THREE pieces for consideration. This could look like:

• 2 poems + 1 art piece

• 1 story + 2 poems

• 1 prose piece + 1 poem + 1 art piece

• BUT, your overall submission (i.e. all three pieces) should not exceed 10 pages.

• Please submit each piece in a separate PDF file.

• Site of Submission: Submit through this form: https://forms.gle/coQXXZVU3bMp18fBA.

WORK BANK

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at contact@unootha.com.