Submissions

Soanyway Issues

Submissions are welcomed at all times from varied disciplines, in any medium, format, and language, provided they conform to the directions listed below. We also advise potential contributors to read our homepage description and look through our previous issues (also browsable by cover and index) before submitting.

For more dates, deadlines, themed open calls and opportunities, please watch this space, sign up to our Mailing List and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Please:

Submit via email directly to info@soanywaymagazine.org
Use WeTransfer for large files.
Use ‘Submission, [your name, work title]’ as the subject heading of your email. If you have a question, include ‘QUERY’ in the subject.
Include a brief description of the submission (no more than 100 words).
Adhere to the following limits:
- 1000 words for text
- 40 lines poetry
- 5 images (unless part of a series with minimal text)
- Audio-visual submissions (including music and film) are recommended up to 4 minutes, but may be accepted up to 10 minutes.

Please note that as an entirely voluntary-run project, we are not able to offer fees to contributors.

Soanyway Reviews

These will be published on a rolling basis, in between our issues.

Reviews of exhibitions, books, poetry, translation, music, theatre, opera, architecture, design, ceramics etc.

We interpret the review form broadly, and we would like to publish work that experiments with the idea. This means it can incorporate commentary, interview, conversation, comparison and other forms of response.

These reviews can be from any time, place, discipline. If you have reviewed an exhibition that happened 2 years, 10 years or a 50 years ago, we would like to see it. If you went to a concert last week, or watched a performance yesterday, we would like to hear about it. If you think there is a book from a 100 years ago, or a film or piece of music, that you think missed its chance or you've had further thoughts about, send us your review of it.

We ask that they are no longer than 1,500 words, unless you contact us to ask otherwise. Please include a 50-100 word description of your review. If you are not sure whether your idea fits, please read our magazine description on the homepage, browse our contents and email us your query.

LATEST ANNOUNCEMENTS for Open Calls

5th June 2023

ESCAPING THE FRAME: CONVERSATIONS IN PAINT
Deadline: Monday 12th June 2023

Plutarch: “painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.”

Mira Schor: “even if they can’t decipher the meaning, I want the viewer to think, ‘this is language’.”

Leopold Stokowski: “musicians paint their pictures on silence.”

Hilma af Klimt: “the pictures were painted directly through me.”

Laura Owens: “the way I approach painting is to ask myself what I haven’t been putting in a painting, and why I shouldn’t try to put that thing in.”

Contemporary painting has become less fixed within its own physical and material limitations, expanding from the flat space of the picture plane and beyond the location of a vertical wall. Soanyway Issue 15 'Escaping the frame: conversations in paint' will explore:

The relationship between painting and language; exchanges, conversations and digressions in paint.
Painting as a verb or a noun, an action or an object; ‘reading’ painting – its surface, scale and materiality alongside its meaning or story.
The materiality of paint and predominance of the digital image; the relationship of painting and screen.
Various forms of space as an expanded canvas; objects and installations that function or are experienced spatially as painting; painting experienced spatially.

We welcome submissions from all disciplines, exploring the basis of painting, painting itself, responses to painting, or curatorial strategies for painting. Canvas, page, stage. Before paint, with paint, after paint.

This is a limited-time call with a short deadline. We need to receive submissions by Monday 12th June 2023. Please follow the guidelines for submitting above. Please note that as an entirely voluntary-run project, we are not able to offer fees to contributors.

7th November 2022

Open call – INSTRUCTION: STORYTELLING IN ART AND DESIGN
Final Deadline: 9th December 2022 (Proposals accepted by 17th November 2022 — sending a proposal isn't a requirement).

Soanyway’s magazine description asks for ‘work that tells stories using any combination of words, images and sounds’.

This special issue of Soanyway focuses on Art and Design, calling for a consideration of Storytelling, Processes of Making, Using and Instructions. It will also feature a separate special ‘insert’ dedicated to the American Industrial Designer Douglas Kelley, and is scheduled to be published in early 2023.

How do instructions tell stories, or utilise storytelling? How do products and services we interact with everyday involve us in their story? What are the processes of making?

Who makes the work? How is a work assembled? What is the relationship between a script or score and its performance? What effect do instructions have as rules or restrictions?

As part of the Oulipo group, established in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais to create works using constrained writing techniques, Georges Perec created his most famous work, ‘Life: A User's Manual’ (1978). In 1981, Samuel Beckett wrote ‘Quad’, with diagrams and step-by-step instructions of how the television play was to be performed. Conceptual Art, emerging in the 1960s, frequently uses forms of instruction, as part of the work and for the making or installation of the work, including works associated with the Fluxus movement, and works by Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono.

We want works that engage with the concept of instructions and making. We welcome contributions which consider the ideas, references and questions raised above. We are happy to receive proposals by 17th November 2022 and / or final contributions by 9th December 2022.

Please note that as an entirely voluntary-run project, we are not able to offer fees. We ask that you read the guidelines as listed above.

2nd August 2022

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – DEADLINE: Monday 22 August 2022
Issue 13, Just : WALKING (and what this entails)

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)
“I don't really think, I just walk.” (Paris Hilton)

Whether you subscribe to Nietzsche’s view or Paris Hilton’s approach, we invite submissions for Soanyway Issue 13 that respond to the idea of ‘just walking’ and what this might entail. Please follow the 5 guidelines listed above.

If, like Johnny Cash, you walk the line, or like Dionne Warwick, walk on by, or you go walking after midnight like Patsy Cline, we want to hear from you.

DIRECTION – DESTINATION – PILGRIMAGE – EXCURSION – FOLLOWING – LEADING
ROAD – LANE – WAY – TRACK – PATH – ALLEY – PASSAGE – GINNEL – SNICKET
DAWDLING – AMBLING – LINGERING – STRIDING – DASHING – RUSHING – HURRYING
VELOCITY – MOMENTUM – ACCELERATION – DECELERATION – PACE – TIME – RHYTHM

“A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities.” (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking).

Please follow the 5 guidelines listed above.

11th April 2022

Soanyway: Issue 12
We invite submissions to Soanyway for Issue 12 responding to the idea of
RECORDING and DOCUMENTATION.
Deadline 3 May 2022.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking.
Christopher Isherwood

I see no reason for recording the obvious.
Edward Weston

Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?
Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
Julian Barnes

Submissions involving or reflecting on any aspect of RECORDING and DOCUMENTATION are invited in any written, visual or audio form. Please follow our usual submission requirements for issues listed above.

18th August 2021

Soanyway: 'A turn in conversation', our 10th edition will be out soon!
For this issue, we invite submissions in the form of a CONVERSATION.
Deadline 31st August 2021.

Submissions in the form of a CONVERSATION might be an interview (in audio, video or text transcript form) but could also encompass a broader interpretation of the conversational, for instance as exchange, poetry or scripted dialogue, or in visual form. Please adhere to the submission requirements above and remember to include a description of the submission and how you are framing it as a conversation.

17th April 2021

Our next issue MOVEMENT—SPACETIME will be out in June. It will have our second special insert. (The first of these, Lost In Spoleto, came out with Issue 2 in January 2019). The one with our June issue will be Making Early Music, guest-edited by Helen Herbert, and it will include contributions and discussions from a range of disciplines exploring and responding to the subject of early music, encompassing performance, instrument-making, (art) history, and musicology. More information on our June issue will be forthcoming in an announcement nearer the online publication date.

**Open call for cover images:** [ONGOING]

We are now inviting submissions of single photographic images for use as covers in future issues of our online magazine.

For your cover image to be considered for Issue 9 in June, please submit before 7th MAY. Cover submissions sent after this deadline will be considered for future issues.

Soanyway takes its name from a line of dialogue in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film, Zabriskie Point: “So – anyway – so anyway – so – any – way – ’Soanyway’ ought to be one word. Like a place or a river – Soanyway River”. We recommend that you look at the covers of our first eight issues, each involving river/road images here. As you will have seen above, our next issue has the theme MOVEMENT—SPACETIME, so we particularly welcome images that allude to this theme. Images should be portrait format to conform to our layout.

Please submit a maximum of five images as .jpg files of at least 2MB. They should be sent by email to info@soanywaymagazine.org with the subject heading ‘COVER IMAGE’.

(Please also be aware that should your image be selected, it may need to be cropped or adjusted slightly to fit the issue cover.)

Other than the cover call, submissions for our next issue MOVEMENT—SPACETIME are now closed, but details on how to submit contributions for consideration for future issues can be found above.

Thank you, we look forward to hearing from you!