Black Sun Lit is now accepting submissions for the fifth volume of Vestiges: Lacunae.
The writer of the twenty-first century is both confronted and confounded by a world that has become all too knowable. With erudition and the future at their fingertips, today’s writer is no longer fulfilled by saying the inexplicable but depleted by what is plausible, experiential, faith-giving: the writer explains away their craft to consumption; literature merely indexes their crises, cataloged for sentimental, surveillable, informational, and datable motives. Ion—whose sheer virtue lies in his superfluous memorization and rhapsodic uselessness—panders and professes to the crowd not as someone who skillfully knows, but as a timeworn soothsayer: a false prophet of a mythic past. For the assuredness of destiny we prosper in uncertainty. For the acknowledgement of certainty we progress in the chasms of history.
The past is that from which we have been resigned to persistently and hopelessly move forward: limping, lethargic, floor-scratched and bear-trapped. Tethered by temporal circumstances and always returning as something or someone rather hued, rusted, resurrected, ruinously ephemeral, and ravishingly spectral, memory is evermore identified by what is missed, what it is missing, what it replenishes, what it can be filled with, what no longer is, and by that for which it grieves. Memory is the present’s lack: a memorial to what could have been and a testament to what falsely survives; it is a place of salvage, a haunting ground, an imprint as pain-inducing as it is pleasure-reminiscent, an alternate and non-sequential life long gone but which can be transmitted to an existence currently regretted.
For this issue of Vestiges, we are looking for works in which death hangs on the balance of a breath; textual memories plucked from their funeral procession, hesitant to cease, frozen from the fridge yet melting on their march. Send us your elegies, laments, meditations, fragments, abandoned works, unbridgeable gulfs, languished poems, and autodidactic literary failures. We seek the disproportionate, the absentminded, the excessive, and the meticulously diminished; fantasies shamefully recreated; revelations relived and repeated; longings that will never be satisfied in space and time. We want the death certificate of knowledge, the mortuary of remembrance, literature—as Bataille would have it—“pitted with holes.”
Submissions for Vestiges will remain open until December 31. To be considered, submit—using the Vestiges_05: Lacunae category on our Submittable page—either one work of prose (between 3,500–5,000 words) or up to six poems (in one document, clearly indicating the start of each piece, and no more than twelve pages). Essays and works in translation that correspond to the issue’s theme are especially encouraged and should follow the respective criterion for prose and poems stated above. As is customary for BSL, there are no strict limits regarding form. All work should be previously unpublished. No more than one submission per person/reading period. Simultaneous submissions accepted. Work sent to or currently being evaluated for digital vestiges, our online series, will also be considered for the issue. For additional guidelines, click here.
Thank you for allowing us to review your work—we look forward to reading.