ROAM - CFP

CALL FOR CREATIVE SUBMISSIONS: ROAM 4 Creative Journal, 2024

Living in the “Here and Below” (Rilke)

Following the Spring/Autumn 2023 edition of ROAM 3 where we looked at shifting notions of home, in our fourth issue we broaden our focus to the self as regards to the wider world and different forms of alterity. Whether it be an increasing engagement with technology and AI or a critical awareness of our relation to the planet, we find ourselves amidst new contrasts and positionings that question our place in the world. The African-origin relational concept of Ubuntu, “humanity to others” — “I am because we are”— and the broader turn to an ethics of care and response-ability seem increasingly compelling, given our present struggle with the urgent concerns of climate change and war.

In looking at care, our attention is drawn to dailiness and the imperceptible everyday: we engage with our immediate spheres, over which some influence can be exerted. Small rituals that add structure and meaning can be experienced as vital elements for rebuilding during difficult times. The eco-philosopher Donna Haraway has written about the need for a new human worlding with animals, geographies, temporalities, of “learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” taking on “response-ability for a damaged earth” (2016). Some thinkers draw spiritual perspectives, seeing sacred elements in the everyday, notably in place. In her book Tender Maps the writer Alice Maddicott explores the Celtic concept of “thin places,” alluding to what, pilot and psychiatrist, Alan McGlashan describes as the “translucent nature of all things” that transforms the sensible universe and invests all objects with a sharp intensity of being.”

In our upcoming, Spring 2025, issue of ROAM we welcome submissions that address creative contemplations of significant change in our emotional, cultural, geographic and political habitats.

These might draw on:

• rediscovering the local
• the building of new communities/rebuilding of old communities
• the body and the self
• the self and nature
• our new non-human communities (animals and the inorganic world)
• ecology on the micro level
• everyday rituals of the domestic
• virtual imaginaries

Submissions can include unpublished poems, short fiction, memoir, essay, photos or film. Proposals should be brief: prose should not exceed 1500 words, poetry 30 lines (max 3 poems), film (5 minutes) and photos a maximum of 3 (high resolution, at least 2000 pix)

Please send your submissions by 15 January 2025 to rephome@letras.ulisboa.pt with a subject heading “ROAM 4, 2025”. We look forward to hearing from you.

Jean Page, Mary Fowke, Zuzanna Zarebska

Editors ROAM

Representations of Home Project (RHOME)

University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES/CEAUL)