What: Parts Unknown is about our modern cities how they gleam and how they crumble, how they’re neglected and overgrown, how they’re re-seeded and re-developed. We’re interested in half-wild spaces, the places where city and country meet and part and how they co-exist. We’ll take your city art. We’ll take your country art. We’ll take your outskirts, your greenways, and your brownfields art.
How: Parts Unknown is a collaborative on-line project that will result in an image/text anthology from Winnipeg's Alchemical Press. The blog will operate for a year, posting images and text weekly. In addition to original images/texts, we’re interested in texts based on artworks and artworks based on texts posted to the site. Call it hommage, call it ekphrasis, call it collaboration: we want it all.
When: The first deadline is March 15, 2012 but we will be accepting material throughout 2012. There is no guarantee that works that appear on the blog will be included in the final anthology, but there’s a good chance.
Guidelines:
Artist guidelines: A submission consists of up to four black and white artworks (comics, photographs, drawings) that would fit on a 10″ × 6″ page and a biographical statement of 3-5 lines. Submissions can be in the form of jpgs or pdfs.
Writer guidelines: A submission consists of up to four texts of no more than 33 lines in length and a biographical statement of 3-5 lines. Poems/short fictions/non-fictions must be previously unpublished in book form. Submissions should be in the form of PDFs.
Other notes:
1) If your piece is a response to something on the site, please identify it clearly.
2) We will confirm receipt of submissions within a week. Editorial meetings are held monthly.
3) Parts Unknown is only open to artists and writers who are Canadian citizens or landed immigrants.
Editors: Ariel Gordon, John Toone, Michael Sanders
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer whose first book of poetry, Hump (Palimpsest Press), was published in 2010. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Writer and the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie. The chapbook How to Prepare for Flooding (JackPine Press), a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, was released in fall 2011. She posts macro pictures of mushrooms from Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Forest to janedayreader.blogspot.com.
John Toone’s first collection of poetry, From Out of Nowhere, was published by Turnstone Press in spring 2009. He published two kids’ books in fall 2009, Catch that Catfish! and Hope and the Walleye. His poems also appear in the story Sixgun Quixote from the new graphic novel The Imagination Manifesto (Alchemical Press). John is a past president of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild. His next collection of poetry, Shot in the Woods, is a dark comedy inspired by the true story of when he was shot in the woods. Visit him online at www.johntoone.ca.
Michael Sanders is a producer, cinematographer, photographer and graphic designer based in Winnipeg.
