Wednesday, May 20, 2009

THIS IS NOT MY SPECIALITY: ASSIGNMENT NO. 1

Do you tell the truth? Lie your pants off!
Pathological thread-weaver? Confess!
Fictioneers? Narrative Schmarrative. Bring the lyric home!
Poets lay down your fears of linear time. You can do this.

ACTUALLY more than just a matter of genre jumping, (because aren’t genres so 2008?), we want you to ransack your writing proclivities and obsessions and turn them inside out. Make your short lines long. Stop using so much alliteration. Transform your existential crises into monologues about Tetris and matching your socks to your belt, or, (for real), vice versa!

Along with your new alien, wondrous, and riskily-written feat, send us a little blurb about why it’s different for you, and how it made you feel.

Interpret the assignment how you’d like; be inventive; make it feel wrong. Then please, oh please, send it to us!

FOR THIS FIRST ISSUE WE ARE ALSO LOOKING FOR:
general awesomeness in all forms.

Get to it! By 08 15 2009, please!

Super Arrow (Flying Powerfully As If Launched by Geena Davis)

“Super Arrow” is a kind of partial transliteration of “supererogatory,” meaning, beyond what is required – even beyond what is wanted. It is true, perhaps, that we are irascibly irrepressible, and that our excitement about words and art and all of these things will refuse to wane, except perhaps when we are very tired as a result of other people, who look askance when we avoid doing certain non-germane and less-than-joyous tasks. Luckily, these tasks are mostly limited to dish washing and checking our voicemail.

We hope that Super Arrow will function as a generative entity, as well as a slightly more traditional journal. Which is to say: we love throwing down assignments/prompts and we would squeal all the more loudly if you were inspired by these assignments, and then made wonderful things out of words and not-words and then sent us copies of those things so that we could publish the new and lovely things. And then, presto! It will be a veritable orchard growing from a humble handful of seeds.

In addition to these ASSIGNMENTS, we will also offer other departments to showcase dialogue and discourse and plainly stellar writing, but mostly you will have to wait until our first issue to examine our fledgling yet spreading breadth.

When considering sending something to us, remember that we are idiosyncratic and maybe even fickle. That being said, we are also total romantics. Here we are, over-caffeinated and wistfully staring out of the café window at the lightly falling rain. We are waiting for you to sweep us off of our feet. It is up to you to design the method for doing so.

We find ourselves quite interested in cross-genre work, and what many well-established publications would call “formal play.” We like a good story, a stabbingly beautiful line, but too, we like to see a writer’s mind working, pushing. We are not modern, post-modern, realist, fabulist, or even fabulous, but hopefully all of those things at one time or another.

We hear you are fabulous all the time. Help us be more like you. Send us your work, to superarrowfliestrue@gmail.com in a doc or pdf. DocX is no good for us at all.

For artists of a visual stripe, jpegs of at least 600 dpi are great. Please size responsibly.

Auralists could go for mp3s and we would adore it.

Send along any questions you have, regarding submissions or otherwise.

Your art is like a gorgeous and dangerous yellow dust storm; we are totally a dry Nebraskan farm circa 1934 waiting for your enveloping color.