echoverse, a digital collection of writing about environmental change, is seeking submissions for its inaugural 2020 issue.

• Submissions should be under 1,500 words and can be a creative work in any genre: a poem, a prose poem, a microfiction, a short essay, a hybrid work, etc.

• Submissions may be sent to contactechoverse [at] gmail [dot] com and should include: 1) a brief author’s note, including any previous publications, 2) your submission, pasted into the body of your email. 

• echoverse encourages submissions from writers of all identities, living anywhere, published and unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are okay. No fee to submit. Submissions close March 20, 2020.

echoverse

In poetry, echo verse is a form of repetition, where a line provides an echo, or an answer, to the one that comes before it. The title of this project gives a nod to the call and response nature of prompt-based writing and my aim to grow this project into an ongoing, outward-spreading, multi-volume endeavor in years to come.

echoverse is also a gesture of optimism–an insistence that an accumulation of voices need not be an echo chamber or a feedback loop. Rather, by collecting, I suspect we can create positive, productive echoes that, like the universe (or like a Yayoi Kusama infinity box), are ever-expanding.

project details

When we read the news, climate crisis is often characterized on the largest of scales. We discuss its impact on the entire globe, a whole continent, all the oceans, an entire species. But, while climate change affects us all, we don’t experience its effects in uniform ways; they impact different populations and individuals distinctly. We all have our own very personal relationships with environments that have changed, are changing, and will continue to change around us.

This project aims to step away from the broad and informational and instead look at the particulars of lived experience. echoverse will collect writing that makes change that often seem far off and abstract more immediate, concrete, encountered, and felt. 

Volume 1 of echoverse will be titled “day to day.” Our hope is that you will think about the environment not just as a sweeping term for the natural system we live in, but also as a place that is entirely tangled up with our memories, daily routines, imagination, and wonder.