ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

We welcome short stories, microfiction, and self-contained chapters of longer works that explore place through narrative, human characters’ relationships with the spaces they inhabit and the nonhumans they encounter, and the reciprocal processes of how humans, nonhumans, and places shape one another. Stories that ask intriguing questions and follow them to unpredictable conclusions are preferred over thinly veiled polemics. Let your fiction live!

Scholarly Articles: We welcome scholarly article manuscripts, formatted according to the MLA Handbook, 9th Edition, that demonstrate a deep exploration of the humanities through integrative theoretical approaches and applied practices relevant to the fields of environmental humanities and ecocriticism, including examinations of the ways environmental values and practices are expressed in texts, broadly conceived, including creative writing, art, and film. We welcome essays that explore pedagogical approaches (how to teach a text or a topic) or public-facing scholarship. Authors should make explicit how their work connects to, engages or challenges environmental values, issues, practices, or policies.

Creative Nonfiction: We invite creative nonfiction that considers “nature,” ecology, and the environment as constructs alongside and intersecting with multiple identity forms (including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, class, geopolitical affiliation); social and cultural histories; social justice, activism, and anti-colonial and decolonial movements; and other aesthetic forms, such as film, visual, or installation art. We encourage risky and imaginative prose, and accept experimental forms, such as flash nonfiction, lyric, and collage.

We invite poems that choose questions over answers, practices over polemics, and discovery over dirge. We are especially interested in poems invested in new, thoughtful approaches, forms, and voices that address what it means to think about, live on, and be with the Earth. It is our firm belief that poems about the environment reflect our social world, invite innovation, give form to cultural critique, and imagine other futures for our planet.