Shared Ecologies invites pitches for essays, poetics, sonic engagements, and mixed media writing for its upcoming nature writing publication, titled Writing Beyond Nature: Poetic and Sonic Ecologies.

Guest Edited by Damian Christinger

Pitch deadline: 21st September 2025

At Shared Ecologies, we believe that ecological thinking must move not only through disciplines, but through forms, sensations, ruptures, and resonances.

We are now inviting submissions for the new issue of Writing Natures, exploring ecocriticism at the edges of poetics and sound—writing that does not merely describe the world but listens to it, distorts with it, becomes entangled in its decay and vitality. Ecocriticism becomes a contested and expanded term in Timothy Morton’s seminal text Ecology Without Nature, where he resituates the term ‘environment’ as a point of investigation, one that “holds us back from meaningful engagements with what, in essence, nature is all about: things that are not identical to us or our preformed concepts.”

This call draws upon Timothy Morton’s text, which challenges the romantic and often uncritical aesthetic of ‘nature’ as something separate, whole, or inherently good. In this spirit, we seek contributions that dismantle inherited ecological imaginaries and tune into the sonics of coexistence, breakdown, and emergence.

We welcome work that explores:

• The poetics of ruin, compost, residue – How do we write from ecological collapse without elegy alone?
• Sonic entanglements – What do we hear when we listen beyond the human? How might the aural become a method of ecological attention?
• Atmospheric and vibrational writing – Forms that hum, drone, breathe, or reverberate with more-than-human worlds.
• Experimental ecologies – Texts that leak across essay, sound, theory, and verse to embody entangled lifeforms.
• Unnatural aesthetics – How can we write “ecology” without falling back on the image of untouched nature?

Guidelines:

Accepting submissions in the form of:

• Essays (critical or lyrical) – 2,000 to 3,000 words
• Poetry (including sound or visual components) – up to 5 poems or 5 minutes audio
• Sonic pieces – up to 10 minutes in duration
• Interdisciplinary or hybrid formats welcome

Your pitch must be up to 200-250 words, describing the form of writing you will be conducting along with a concept note. Visuals or audio files can be added if available or relevant.

Send your pitches to: sharedecologies@gmail.com

Please include a brief bio and a short artist/writer’s statement (max 200 words) along with two writing samples (Published or Unpublished)

Please note that only Indian citizens can apply for this.

Let us write the shared ecologies of now—not idealized, not whole, but vibrating, disrupted, and alive.