The Basics
Submissions for Spoon Knife 4 are now closed. Authors will be notified of their acceptance or rejection during the first half of 2019.
Submissions for Spoon Knife 5: Liminal are open until December 31, 2019. See the call for submissions here.
Autonomous Press seeks submissions of poetry, short fiction, and short memoir pieces for an upcoming anthology, Spoon Knife 4: A Neurodivergent Guide to Spacetime.
Scheduled for publication in Fall 2019, this fourth volume of the Spoon Knife Anthology series follows The Spoon Knife Anthology: Tales of Compliance, Defiance, and Resistance (2016), Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber (2017), and Spoon Knife 3: Incursions (2018).
| Please email the editors at sk4.spacetime@gmail.com for updates on this project, and you may wish to see the call for submissions for Spoon Knife 5: Liminal as well.
Sign up for the email list to receive news on these and other projects. |
What We’re Looking For
As people, we’re drawn to both telling stories and listening to the stories of others. Navigating life can be joyous, frustrating, frightening, sorrowful, and complex. Among all these realities we usually find one truth that always remains: the unknown. And what do we do when confronted with the unknown? We might fear it, try to avoid it entirely, or charge towards it with aplomb or gusto.
Speculative fiction has long dealt with themes surrounding the unknown. Sci-fi and fantasy themes have allowed their creators to conceptualize how space and time can exist, merge, warp, or even disappear in strange and terrifying ways. How in the hell do you map a black hole? Can you really kill your own grandfather? And what happens if your past self travels forward and meets the present iteration of you? What do past, present, and future even mean?
Those are just a few thoughts, but we’re basically looking for work that examines and explores two fundamental ideas: time and space. Moreover, we want work that engages with themes of neurodivergence, queerness, and/or the intersections of neurodivergence and queerness. These might include, but are not limited to, themes such as:
- Travel through time and space via technological methods (vortex manipulators, star ships, big blue boxes, etc.)
- Involuntary acts of time travel through PTSD-related mental/emotional trauma
- Deliberately journeying/revisiting through memories in one’s own timeline
- “Slipping” through time and/or space via astral projection, quantum jumping, or other non-tech means (such as in Octavia Butler’s Kindred)
- Outcomes and consequences of changing past events
- Meeting one’s past/future selves
Spoon Knife 4: A Neurodivergent Guide to Spacetime is edited by B. Allen and Dora Raymaker, based on the theme created by N.I. Nicholson. You can contact the editors at sk4.spacetime@gmail.com.
Format and Length
Fiction and Memoir: We’re looking 10,000 words or less of fully-polished prose, submitted in standard manuscript format (title page with contact info, double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font, pages numbered with either title or author’s name in the header.)
Poetry: You may submit up 5 pieces of any length and style, provided they fit the theme of this collection.
All submissions must be in a Word-compatible format (.doc, .docx, .odt).
When and How to Submit
Submissions for Spoon Knife 4 are now closed. Authors will be notified of their acceptance or rejection during the first half of 2019.
Submissions for Spoon Knife 5: Liminal are open until December 31, 2019. See the call for submissions here.
Payment for accepted submissions will be 1 cent per word, to be sent by check.
When submitting your work, please put in the subject line one of the following:
- “Spoon Knife 4 Submission – Fiction”
- “Spoon Knife 4 Submission – Memoir”
- “Spoon Knife 4 Submission – Poetry”
Also, please include a cover letter that clearly specifies the name under which you want to be credited, along with a 3-4 sentence bio written in the third person. The name and bio should be typed exactly as you want them to appear in the book.