Pitches (Climate Justice)

Scalawag's Salt, Soil, & Supper section is now accepting pitches for the inaugural Fall Almanac issue.

The Almanac is Salt, Soil, & Supper's annual flagship issue that expands the climate justice and Southern environments theme of the original newsletter to include narratives and creative contributions that also emphasize the traditions, practices, festivities, and lenses of critique that have allowed Southerners to persevere in the face of hostile physical, political and cultural environments.

We are open to fiction, non-fiction, and poetry submissions, as well as multimedia short film, audio, digital art, multimedia & photo essays, and social media specific content. Pitches should consider the following, or related, Salt, Soil & Supper themes:

Salt (Preservation): Salt has long given humans and their environments the capacity to preserve, and with it, the ability to grow communities, to travel further and to sustain. This capacity to live longer, more secure lives is in large part due to the way salt has long "kept" food, resources and the human body itself against the threat of expiration.

Submissions under this theme broadly consider the ways in which Southerners both rely on traditional and new means of preservation in the face of environmental catastrophe, antiblack, white supremacist violence and state terror.

Examples include:

Survival skills and adaptation practices
Meditations on preparing and living through "disaster"
Spiritual practices and their preservation
Yoga/meditation practices, astrology/cosmology
African/Black/Indigenous or "native" practices
Narratives centering social justice movements and mutual aid practices
Historic preservation efforts
Seasonal holidays, festivals and other celebrations

Soil (Growth and Recovery): The soil is essential for the growth of that which nourishes and preserves communities, spirit, and our cultures. The "soil" section honors the ways in which southerners work against the longue duree of the plantation to restore and build alternative support infrastructures. Just as Black and Indigenous land stewards have developed practices to restore, protect and defend the soil + other natural resources that make growth possible.

"Soil" here then refers to those practices we employ personally, communally, and culturally that stabilize and sustain. It is in the fertile soils of community cohesion and a collective understanding of the conditions that (re)produce the southern paradigm where the seeds of political revolt are sewn.

Examples include:

Southern mutual aid infrastructures and other support networks
The erosion of state infrastructures such as school and healthcare systems, power grids and water, welfare/assistance programs etc.
Critical reflections on state repression tactics such as fascist public polic(e)y decisions and legislative agendas, police militarization + terror, and the inadequate state response to climate catastrophe
Climate catastrophe and prisons
Food and land justice narratives

Supper (Nourish): Supper submissions should ask and answer: what feeds the South? How does The South feed us? And what are the conversations happening around the table that nourishes Southern critique? The Supper sub-section is envisioned as an audiovisual content space featuring social media content submissions for the Salt, Soil & Supper Instagram and Twitter accounts. Its intention is to center critical dialogue that deepens the southern climate conversation.

Examples include:

Feature interviews and group conversations (audio, video, and/or transcript)
TikTok, reels or social media graphics featuring issue-based reporting

The deadline for submissions to be included in the Almanac is 9/8/2023. Pitch your story idea by filling out the pitch form below, or sending an email directly to tea@scalawagmagazine.org