Call for Submissions: Doubt

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Issue 76 (“Doubt”): Submit Now

January 25 – March 15*

*WE HAVE EXTENDED THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR THE CONTESTS TO MARCH 22nd.

For Issue 76, we seek work that shows us doubt in its many forms and how we go about expressing it. This call is two-fold:

  1. Fiction and poetry contest submissions. See announcement of judges here.
  2. Non-contest submissions, in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and flash prose

Remember to follow our general submission guidelines!


It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
– Wendell Berry
Our doubts are tethered to our beliefs. And are when they come into conflict is that when the “real work” begins as Wendell Berry suggests? If so, how do we reckon with our doubts? How does a someone handle doubt in a marriage versus doubt in a religion? Which is to say, how does doubt shape-shift from person to person, culture to culture?
Are there ideas, situations, conflicts that return us back, always, to what we know and don’t know? Which means returning us, always, back to doubt?
I dream you, doubt,
nightly—
for what is the meaning of dreaming
if not that all we are while inside it
is transient, amorphous, in question?
– Jane Hirshfield, “My Doubt”
Why do we return back to doubt? Is it both helpful and hurtful?
Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.
– Khalil Gibran

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