Call for Papers: Word Hoard Issue 6 Call for Papers

Word Hoard is currently soliciting articles, essays, interviews, poetry, fiction, creative pieces, and other publishable works on the theme of HANGOVER.

How do you prepare for a hangover? You can’t. Though folk and faux-scientific remedies abound, you can neither predict nor control what comes after celebration, outburst, exertion, or indulgence. A hangover reaches its tortuous apex when intoxicant levels return to zero, when necessary recovery and bare survival become the consequences of excess. How does one begin to cope, to clean up? How does one think through, and despite, one’s bodily timeline? What of the past still saturates the present?

Hangover signifies multiply. It is base corporeality. It is leftovers, remnants, and remainders. It is the urine or hair follicle drug test, the thing (we desire) forgotten, the carried-over, the persistent anachronism. It is retrospection on the night before or, broadly, on a time before now. From Ernest Hemingway’s famous maxim to “Write drunk; edit sober” to the ancient wisdom of the “hair of the dog,” hangover makes us look back, reconstruct, and reconsider even as we wonder, Was it worth it?

In addition to the above concepts, submissions might also address

o cultures of celebration, cultures of regret, or their representations;
o anachronism as temporal hangover; o retrospection or reconstruction;
o recovering, or recovery from, states of hardship;
o abjection or rejection;
o representations of detox or withdrawal, of substance use or abuse;
o disambiguations of “party,” from verb (“to party”) to complicity (“to be party to something”), from inclusion (“party invitation”) to factionalism (“political party”), from the ad hoc (“search party”) to the illusion of choice (“party unity”);
o or any other interpretation (broad or narrow) of “hangover.”

Word Hoard invites submissions (1,000 – 1,500 words of review; 3,000 – 5,000 words of academic prose; creative works of any length or size), due any time between November 30th, 2016, and February 6th, 2017. All submissions will undergo a blind peer review process, and academic submissions (formatted according to MLA guidelines, please) will receive detailed and constructive feedback. Submissions should not contain the author’s name or obvious identification marks to ensure an objective blind peer review process—but please include a brief author or artist bio (up to 50 words) in the body of your submission email. Accepted submissions can expect online publication in September, 2017. Our dialogic, multigeneric format ensures that each accepted creative and academic submission can expect a response (to be published alongside the submission) from an established or emerging researcher, author, or artist.

To submit, or for more information, please contact us at wordhoard.editors@gmail.com. Previous issues of Word Hoard are available at http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wordhoard. We look forward to reading your work.

Your sympathetic Word Hoard editors, Meghan O’Hara, Andy Verboom, Emily L. Kring, & Maryam Golafshani