We are looking to fill a few slots in a book, to be published in 2022. To be considered, please read the following guidelines.
Source: Unsplash
We are looking for works generated via the following prompts:
-The Invocation
-The Cut-Up Method
-Inspired by Nature
To emphasise, these are techniques for creative inspiration, not thematic prompts. The responses can contain occult or folkloric themes, but they don’t have to. Genre-wise, our tastes are omnivorous. You can respond with literary fiction, magical realism, romance, horror, science fiction, Weird Fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy—whatever comes to you.
The fee paid for the selected works is £200. You can submit:
-One-three poems
-Short fiction (1500-5000 words in length)
-Creative non-fiction (1500-5000 words in length)
Submit work to cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com. Put ‘Cunning Folk Book’ in the subject line followed by the method, from those mentioned above. The deadline for submitting is 15th June 2021, but we will consider work sent earlier and slots will fill accordingly. You can send us up to two pieces, though only one for each theme. Unfortunately, due to our small team size and volume of submissions, we will only be able to reply to those whose work we wish to commission. We hope, however, that these prompts are helpful in inspiring creative flow.
More about the prompts
The Invocation
Throughout history, there have been artists who invoked creative help. The Ancient Greeks and Romans invoked muses to inspire stories, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Homer’s The Odyssey. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes communicated with spirit guides via a homemade ouija board. We can invoke help, too. This might be a recognised deity or daimon, a personification of nature, an archetype, an ancestor, a spirit guide; it could also be a feeling or memory invoked. Whatever is invoked, the idea is to allow it to speak through us, a kind of automatic writing. Whether we believe the messenger to be from inside or outside ourselves, we become the vehicle for this messenger. We can polish the work later.
The Cut-Up technique
The Dadaists used the cut-up technique to strive for nonsense, reactionary in part to the rational, mechanical world developing around them. They wished for a more intuitive way of being, a less destructive one. This artistic method was borrowed later by William S. Burroughs, who saw it as a way of escaping what he considered a “language virus,” getting closer to the truth. Burroughs was not the last to use it. Many contemporary writers and songwriters have found this technique helpful, from David Bowie to Thom Yorke. The cut-up method can give you an original poem, or it can help you get to the heart of things for creative non-fiction and fiction.
Inspired by Nature
At their core, most forms of divination involve looking to nature for answers. In Ancient China, diviners burnt an oracle bone. The way it burnt would provide answers. Oracles are cornerstones of many spiritual practices throughout the world and history. We can scry into water and clouds and a flame. Turn an apple skin into an oracle; when we throw it over our shoulder, what initial does it spell out? In parts of Medieval Yorkshire, young women believed this would be the first initial of their future husbands. It could also hint at the name of your character, the title of your work, an answer to a question or creative block. William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence famously begins: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower’. Creative inspiration is all around us. Sometimes gazing at the cosmos in the night sky might answer a question seemingly trivial or insignificant in scope. And then focussing our attention on a grain of sand might help us figure out the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Ask nature to help you get unstuck, or for creative inspiration. You may well find the seed of an idea, out there among the woods and the flowers.
We will continue Spiritus Mundi call-outs in autumn 2021. We will publish responses to scrying in the coming month.