Hybrid is a slippery term that swirls and eddys between literary genres, often a seining catch-all for those weird little ones who slip through holes and between fraying boundaries. We’re looking for those strange creatures, specifically those amalgams that smash word and image together to fashion something altogether new. If you reimagined your writing by re-imaging it, what would you create? That’s what we’re looking for. Give us that piece.
Send us your text-based hybrid work—fiction, CNF, or poetry—that opens up or crashes against image. An erasure poem of your pre-teen journal. A magazine collage set against flash fiction. Your visual poetry, or your micro-fiction envisioned inside art, or a flow chart of how your heart has broken. A flash CNF shaped inside the geometry your words demand, again and again and again. Think chimeras, cross-species, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. As always, we want your weird.
Signposts to guide you:
- “Beside” by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Kweli Journal
- “My Friends” by Sarah Minor, Complete Sentence Lit
- “A Folio of Graphic Poems” by Naoko Fujimoto, Tupelo Quarterly
An important note on erasure work: We suggest reading E. Kristin Anderson’s “Manifesto on Found Poetry” as an ethical standard for working within the form.
At this time, we are not accepting short-form narrative comics as part of the hybrid genre. If you are working in this form, we suggest submitting here: The Nib, Anomaly, The Arkansas International, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gigantic Sequins, Heavy Feather Review, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart, No Tokens, Booth, et. al.
Meet the Editor: Erin Vachon
Erin Vachon holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Rhode Island. Their work has appeared/is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Brevity, and elsewhere. They’re Asst. CNF Ed. at JMWW and workshopped their hybrid-novel at Tin House in 2021. They write in southern New England, and consider it both a blessing and a curse that they live in the area with the highest doughnut shops per capita. You can find their writing at erinvachon.com or on Twitter @erinjvachon.
