Vienna Poetry School call for text submissions 2022
Our Austrian colleagues are looking for short literary texts on the topic of “animals for the magazine of the vienna poetry school #04. Texts in both English and German are welcome. The deadline for submissions is June, 6th, 2022
Our partners from the Vienna Poetry School (sfd) welcome unpublished short texts in German and English from Austria and abroad!
Please send your manuscripts that deal with the topic “Animals”.
The length of each submission may have a maximum of 3,000 characters and all literary genres are accepted.
A jury will select the texts for publication.
Deadline: 6 June, 2022
“the animal”
the sumerian “fable of the wise wolf and the nine stupid wolves”, dated to the middle of the 3rd millennium b.c., is considered the oldest animal poetry in the world. the greek poet aesop, namesake of the fable genre, did not write his animal stories until the 6th century “before christ”. if at all – because aesop’s existence as a historical person is just as disputed as that of the eponym of our era.
it is certain, however, that the stream of allegorical, moralising, anthropomorphising, ideologising, demonising and sentimental animal poetry has not ceased since antiquity. just a few keywords: goethe’s reineke fuchs, schiller’s cranes of ibykus, hoffmann’s tomcat murr, poe’s raven, melvilles’s moby-dick, kafka’s beetle, ebner-eschenbach’s krambambuli, salten’s bambi, kipling’s jungle book, orwell’s animal farm, grass’ flounder … and and and … all the way up to michael köhlmeier’s tomcat matou and deb olin unferth’s chicken liberation novel happy green family. not to mention the well-known bird nerds nell zink, helen macdonald and jonathan franzen. the list is endless.
the relationship between humans and animals is undergoing a long overdue change. the more we know about the “consciousness”, “empathy” and “intelligence” of our animal relatives, the more illegitimate man’s position as the “crown of creation” becomes.
the anthropomorphic animal protection of the past will have to be replaced by a universalistic animal right that has neither a usurpatory nor a sentimental “stable smell”. numerous scientific disciplines have long agreed: if humanity wants to survive the effects of climate change, it must not only dramatically limit its consumption of meat, but also put an end to all use and exploitation of animals in the service of destructive capital. but unfortunately, man is a wolf not only to man, but to everything that crawls and flies on earth…
reason enough to dedicate not only the spring academy 2022 and the sfd festival in autumn, but also the new issue of our magazine sfd& to animals. for as trite as it may sound, the question posed by swedish journalist and author patrick svensson in his book the gospel of the eels is justified: “how much can you actually know about an eel? or about a human being?” it has been shown that these questions sometimes belong together. it seems that any thinking about animals aims at a recognition of ourselves.
in this sense, we are looking for animal texts of all genres: fables, poems, micro-dramas, short stories, graphic novels, photo-poems, lists, tables, etc.
we are looking forward – and eh.. be happy as a pig in clover – to receive your submissions.
fritz ostermayer for the vienna poetry school
Call for text submissions
sfd& ohne netz (animals)
magazine of the vienna poetry school #04
deadline for submissions: 6 June 2022
upload your texts via the online form: >> https://sfd.at/en/text-submission
(only texts sent via the online form are accepted. sfd applies in its publications radical use of small letters. if your text requires capital letters or any other special formatting, ie visual poetry, please contact us at sfd@sfd.at.)
topic: animals (see above)
German and English texts can be submitted
max. length: 3,000 characters (incl. spaces, excl. title).
literary form: open
the vienna poetry school’s >> privacy statement applies.
publication date of the magazine: autumn 2022
Additional information for submissions
You may have a look here
And on the sfd’s Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/poetryschool
About Vienna Poetry School