Rivers: Essays on Form and Water

The editors invite you to submit short-form essays centering on the writer’s experience with rivers–experiences can be of a particular river, or multiple. We are looking for writing that is strongly rooted in place and that opens up into an exploration of form in writing. Questions you might consider: how does your particular experience with/of/alongside a river inform your understanding of form in writing, whether that be the sentence, the line, the paragraph, the stanza, the comma, etc? Hybridity is welcome, lyricism is welcome. We welcome submissions from writers/artists of all genres. We hope to see pieces written directly responding to our hybrid prompt that calls for both attention to environment and to writerly craft (by this, we mean the form language takes, its shape and many terms). Our aim is to bring together a variety of voices, from different geographical, class, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds; we want to assemble different choruses of voices on rivers, rather than one kind of sound. We encourage writers to think capaciously about rivers and water, and the many topics rivers intersect with, among them: childhood, labor, love, home and belonging, Indigenous land, borders and immigration, transit and travel, climate change and conservation, death and disaster, life and rebirth, human ritual and rites, queerness, and more.

Country of Publication & Year Established

United States

Established in 2025