travel writing

 On Miracle Ground XX

          The International Lawrence Durrell Society invites proposals for papers to be presented at a July 2018 conference in downtown Chicago. In a year marking the centenary of Solzhenitsyn’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Durrell’s satirical dystopia Tunc, ILDS welcomes papers reflecting on modernist and postmodern writers or artists who challenged the political and cultural ideologies of their time and place. Interrogating conceptions of exile, survival, and dissent, we will explore how the work of these past intellectual dissidents has shaped our critiques of twenty-first century society.

In his 1988 lecture “The Condition We Call Exile,” Joseph Brodsky said: “Whatever the proper name for these people [refugees, exiles, émigrés], whatever their motives, origins, and destinations, whatever their impact on the societies which they abandon and to which they come may amount to—one thing is absolutely clear: they make it very difficult to talk about the plight of the writer in exile with a straight face. Yet talk we must; and not only because literature, like poverty, is known for taking care of its own kind, but more because of the ancient and perhaps as yet unfounded belief that should the masters of this world be better read, the mismanagement and grief that make millions take to the road could be somewhat reduced.”

A new online journal is seeking critical and creative work related to the theme of embodied experience. Essays, reviews, short prose, poetry, and author interviews are all welcome; see below for more detailed guidelines, plus a list of specific titles for which reviews are especially welcome.

Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures (ISSN 22789642 | E-ISSN 22789650)

This is a the call for submissions and guidelines for the journal section of Coldnoon. If you wish to write for the magazine, please follow the general guidelines of submissions here.

Coldnoon is one of the largest online literary magazines published from Asia. It has published authors from all over the world, largely from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Russia, United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, among others.

Accounts of migration and displacement often focus on the bounded terrains of specific cities and the navigation of certain rooted sites, places of origin and/or destination. At the same time, cartographic and spatial terminology (e.g. “mapping,” “space,” “place,” “orientation”) are used in increasingly metaphorical ways, at the possible expense of more historical and/or materialist approaches to theorizing the global, the planetary, and the transnational. This panel invites contributors to examine the affective as well as material dimensions of being ‘in transit,’ the enabling condition of more familiar narrative tropes of exile, migration, travel and displacement.