Our search for justice brought us to the sea, across the desert, and back to ancient Greece. When we first created the Table of Contents we were pleased but unsettled. It was impossible to ignore the lack of BIPOC voices in our issue. Justice cannot be so narrowly viewed. Our Guest Editor, Laura Barker, spoke to us privately about her own discomfort and asked about reopening for additional submissions.
Our second, BIPOC-only call brought more stories, more poems. Our Table of Contents swelled with gorgeous new words and writers. We can’t erase our lapses, but we can always work toward equity and justice.
Justice is tenuous and changeable in each of our works. It can be a resolution: in Shark Girls, justice is uncovering your mother’s promises and finding your place; in Redlands it’s a literal end to a search; Never Just A Necklace is solving a mystery. It can be about control: Honey and Mneme is regaining a life; With the Nectar is society and women’s aging; Commodities is searching for freedom. For our poets, justice takes the form of Greek Furies, families of feathered predators, and women rising to survival on their own terms. The last few years for Apparition Lit have been marked by death. There have been some hard moments, but publishing new stories and new voices can be an act of life. It balances the scales and tips us further into the light.
Our issue is dedicated to everyone we’ve lost in 2020.
SHORT FICTION
- Shark Girls by Caroline Diorio — 3000 words, 12 minutes reading time
- Redlands by Jay Harper — 2000 words, 8 minutes reading time
- It’s Never Just a Necklace by Ashland East — 4400 words, 18 minutes reading time
- With the Nectar by Jennifer Hudak — 1800 words, 7 minutes reading time
- Commodities by Zebib K. A. — 3300 words, 13 minutes reading time
- Honey and Mneme by Marika Bailey — 5000 words, 20 minutes reading time
POETRY
- On brutal wing by Brian Hugenbruch — 48 lines
- Alecto Chats on Her Smoke Break by Elizabeth R. McClellan — 41 lines
- A Body and Its Hunger by Sarah Ramdawar — 26 lines
- Mothers of the Disappeared by Tehnuka — 37 lines
We are endlessly grateful for the following beautiful essay editorial from our Justice Guest Editor, Laura Barker
Thank you,
Rebecca Bennett, Amy Henry Robinson, Tacoma Tomilson, and Clarke Doty
Apparition Literary Magazine is funded by the editors and by your kind donations. If you’d like to support us, you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter and please consider donating and/or subscribing via our website. For 2020, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve increased our pay rate for short stories to $0.03 per word and poetry to $30 flat rate.
Thank you for reading,
Photo by Kevin Butz on Unsplash
