As many of you are no doubt aware, alongside my own writing, I’m also a co-founder and editor over at Dunlin Press. Over ‘there’, we’ve recently opened up submissions for a book that we’ll be publishing later this year. The scope for the project is as follows:
Dunlin Press is inviting submissions for a new book, Port, to be published in 2019. Non-fiction, reportage and journalistic reports, poetry, fictions, local history, biography, exploratory and experimental texts will be considered.
We are looking for contributions from around the UK and that map ports – the cities, towns and villages where they are located, the landscapes they are part of, the places they connect, the people who inhabit them and work there, and the nature that co-exists there.
What is a port? A harbour? A haven? A place of arrival? A point for departure? A port is a place where ‘here’ contacts ‘there’; where known and unknown meet; where perceptions of possible experience are expanded.
From the traditional fishing village to the mechanised container city and the old docks redeveloped into marinas and cultural quarters, time shapes our ports and ports shape people and society. Who lives there? What occurs there? When and why does the success or failure of a port occur? How do ports frame our experience of island life?
Dunlin Press is seeking contributions for a new book that will explore some of these questions, in writing that challenges what we know of ports around the UK. Which port has made an impact on you? What would you write about it?
We are particularly interested in intelligent writing that contends with social issues, psychogeographies, and exploratory and experimental texts and forms. All writing should be original, of high quality and offer something intriguing, insightful and compellingly different.
For full submission details, see here.
We’re really excited by this project and I’m hoping we’ll get a broad range of submissions from across the UK. And, while I know a lot of poetry people, it would also be good to see lots of prose, reportage, or even prose poems, as we’re not aiming for a poetry anthology. I wonder if some poets will submit in alternative disciplines…
The great thing about opening up a project for submissions is that you never quite know what you’ll get, and while we have a clear editorial vision about what we ‘like’, the final form and breadth of such a project will always really be in the hands of the talented writers – many of whom we might not yet be familiar with. The deadline for submissions is end of March 2019, so this is a time of suspense for us at Dunlin Press.
We’re really looking forward to seeing what falls into our inbox.
MWB
MW Bewick 