paperboats

Climate | Writing | Action | Scotland

Paperboats Zine

The urge to explore and celebrate all the kinds of lives of Planet Earth is stronger than ever, but the environmental and ecological crisis demands we also lift our eyes, and our voices, to species extinction and habitat loss, to what is happening to the forests and hills, the rivers and seas, our streets and gardens. The writer’s instinct to pay attention has never been more vital. Literature can help us to see the natural world – and our place in it – differently.

PAPERBOATS ISSUE EIGHT

NATURE AS LIBRARY: SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN

For Issue Eight of the Paperboats Zine, we’re joining The Nature Library’s Christina Riley to ask you to consider what has been written and continues to be written in nature’s pages. This is a call to tap into seeds, tree rings, soil samples, ice cores. You might consider records, objects, collections, epochs…from the microscopic to the universal. What stories does the natural world tell us and what do we want written into its future?

We invite submissions of up to 700 words of prose (fiction or nonfiction) or up to 30 lines of poetry, which responds to our theme: Nature as Library

 

Guidelines

We publish essays, short fiction and poetry that reflect our commitment, and which focus on Scotland as home ground – writing that shows honesty, care, curiosity and skill. Submissions in English, Scots or Scottish Gaelic, are welcome from writers within and outwith Scotland and we particularly welcome submissions from under-represented groups.

Work should not be previously published. We accept simultaneous submissions but if your work is accepted elsewhere please let us know.

We do not publish pieces by the same author in consecutive issues of the zine, so if you have been published before on Paperboats, please leave a one issue gap before submitting again.

You can read previous issues of the Paperboats Zine here to get a feel for the kind of work we publish.

Paperboats is volunteer-run. A trickle of funds allows us to commission occasional writings and workshops. We’d love to pay all of our writers, but instead, alongside your submission, we invite you to suggest a small action that readers can take in exchange for free access to your donated work.

To submit to this call, please attach your writing as a Word or RTF document to your email and send to submissions@paperboats.org.

Deadline for submissions: Midnight Friday 25th September

Nature as Library Workshop

As co-editor of this issue, Nature Library founder Christina Riley will host a creative writing and bookmaking workshop at The Nature Library in Irvine, inviting imaginative responses to the libraries, archives, indexes, collections and records of the natural world. The workshop will encourage new ways of thinking about libraries in times if climate crisis, asking what is being recorded, how it is being gathered and who by, what stories are told, shared and held onto, and why this matters.

Sign up to our mailing list to stay up to date with our upcoming workshops.

Book Reviews

If you would like to submit a book review for publication on our web site, please first email hello@paperboats.org with an outline of what you would like to submit.

a wee note about payment

We would love to pay our writers – we really would, but we’d love to pay our admin staff too. As it is, paperboats has been put together using our own time and funds in solidarity with activists worldwide who freely dedicate their time and energies to fighting for climate justice. That said, if anyone would like to contribute to paperboats, then that might change. 

If you are interested in making a financial contribution to paperboats, please say hello@paperboats.org