Paperboats is a collective of writers focussed on nature and environment in a time of climate and ecological breakdown. We are Scotland based and global in outlook, and write to affirm the astonishing life of this planet, and how its future may yet be shaped.

PAPERBOATS ISSUE EIGHT

NATURE AS LIBRARY: SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN

For Issue Eight of the Paperboats Zine, we’re joining The Nature Library’s Christina Riley to ask you to consider what has been written and continues to be written in nature’s pages. This is a call to tap into seeds, tree rings, soil samples, ice cores. You might consider records, objects, collections, epochs…from the microscopic to the universal. What stories does the natural world tell us and what do we want written into its future?

We invite submissions of up to 700 words of prose (fiction or nonfiction) or up to 30 lines of poetry, which responds to our theme: Nature as Library. 

Guidelines

We publish essays, short fiction and poetry that reflect our commitment, and which focus on Scotland as home ground – writing that shows honesty, care, curiosity and skill. Submissions in English, Scots or Scottish Gaelic, are welcome from writers within and outwith Scotland and we particularly welcome submissions from under-represented groups.

Work should not be previously published. We accept simultaneous submissions but if your work is accepted elsewhere please let us know.

We do not publish pieces by the same author in consecutive issues of the zine, so if you have been published before on Paperboats, please leave a one issue gap before submitting again.

You can read previous issues of the Paperboats Zine here to get a feel for the kind of work we publish.

Paperboats is volunteer-run. A trickle of funds allows us to commission occasional writings and workshops. We’d love to pay all of our writers, but instead, alongside your submission, we invite you to suggest a small action that readers can take in exchange for free access to your donated work.

To submit to this call, please attach your writing as a Word or RTF document to your email and send to submissions@paperboats.org.

Deadline for submissions: Midnight Friday 25th September