Welcome Back!

Spring 2015

School is back in session at Eastern New Mexico University and the Fall 2015 issue is well underway, which means El Portal is now accepting submissions for its Spring 2016 edition. Prose, poetry, flash fiction, photography, and art are welcome internationally! Deadline October 31st.

For Terms of Submission: Click Here

For Submission Guidelines: Click Here

El Portal is also seeking submissions for its Monthly Web Feature! On the final Wednesday of each month from September through April, we will be showcasing a piece of prose, poetry, photography, or art right here on our blog. If you would like to submit a piece for consideration, please contact us at el.portal@enmu.edu with the subject line “Web Feature Submission.”

For Web Feature Terms of Submission and Guidelines: Click Here

To read some of our previous web features: Click Here

Write West. Send it our way.

We want stories and poems about West. West is a bullet-riddled ’85 Grand Marquis, a gleaming spaceship hovering over Roswell, a cowboy paying for latte with his Amex-card, an alien wondering where in the world to get the golden iPhone. West is where it hurts, West is the rattlesnake you didn’t hear, the dust storm sanding your car, the champagne underneath the Hollywood sign, the checkout line of a grocery store that doesn’t carry mandarin-orange segments in fruit juice, green-chile and cheese burritos from the 24-hour gas station. West is when there’s no West left. West is where you always wanted to be.

Guidelines*:

  • Flash Fiction (500-1,500 words)
  • Short Stories (up to 4,000 words)
  • Creative Nonfiction (up to 4,000 words)
  • Poetry (3-5 poems)
  • Art & Photography (Black & White only; 300 dpi JPEG)

Send submissions to El.Portal@enmu.edu

Deadline: March 31, 2015

View El Portal‘s Terms of Submission page for official rules concerning submissions.

*Please submit all written work in .doc, .docx, or .rtf formats. With the exception of poetry and art/photography, please limit entries to one story or essay. Prizes will be awarded to ENMU students only. Prizes awarded only in Short Story, Poetry, and Art/Photography categories. When entering a submission, please include a 20-50 word biography to be printed alongside your piece in the event that it is accepted for publication.

Cowpokes, aliens, writers, send us your submissions….

We want stories and poems about West. West is a bullet-riddled ’85 Grand Marquis, a gleaming spaceship hovering over Roswell, a cowboy paying for latte with his Amex-card, an alien wondering where in the world to get the golden iPhone. West is where it hurts, West is the rattlesnake you didn’t hear, the dust storm sanding your car, the champagne underneath the Hollywood sign, the checkout line of a grocery store that doesn’t carry mandarin-orange segments in fruit juice, green-chile and cheese burritos from the 24-hour gas station. West is when there’s no West left. West is where you always wanted to be.

Write West. Send it our way.

 

Guidelines*:

Flash Fiction (500-1,500 words)

Short Stories (up to 4,000 words)

Creative Nonfiction (up to 4,000 words)

Poetry (3-5 poems)

Art & Photography (Black & White only; 300 dpi JPEG)

 

Send submissions to El.Portal@enmu.edu

Deadline: March 31, 2015

View El Portal‘s Terms of Submission page for official rules concerning submissions.

 

*Please submit all written work in .doc, .docx, or .rtf formats. With the exception of poetry and art/photography, please limit entries to one story or essay. Prizes will be awarded to ENMU students only. Prizes awarded only in Short Story, Poetry, and Art/Photography categories. When entering a submission, please include a 20-50 word biography to be printed alongside your piece in the event that it is accepted for publication.

These days, writing isn’t a career. It’s a rich man’s hobby (Telegraph)

Can writers still make a career out of writing? Does writing exclude working or middle class writers from its ranks? Is writing a rich man’s sport? Toby Young believes writing has become the hobby of the wealthy or those with comfortable retirement pensions (see excerpt below).

These days, you need a substantial private income – or a public sector pension – to be a full-time writer. Last year, a survey of 2,500 professional authors found that their median income in 2013 was £11,000. That’s a drop of 29 per cent since 2005 and significantly below the minimum salary required to achieve a decent standard of living.

The writing game is notoriously lopsided, in which a small handful of bestselling authors earn a fortune and the vast majority live on scraps, but it’s got worse in the past decade. “You’ve always been able to comfortably house the British literary writers who can earn all their living from books in a single room,” says the author Will Self, whose own royalties have tailed off in recent years. “That room used to be a reception one, now it’s a back bedroom.”

Read the rest of Young’s article over at the Telegraph.

Influence and Homage: When Walt Whitman Met Oscar Wilde

It’s hard to imagine a meeting between two celebrities like Whitman and Wilde. However, history is full of surprises. During his stay in America, the youthful Wilde met with the aging poet Whitman. This meeting between Whitman and Wilde made a lasting impression on Wilde and how he handled his celebrity status. David M. Friedman’s New Republic article “When Walt Whitman Met Oscar Wilde” examines the Whitman-Wilde meeting in 1882 and Wilde’s status before and after his time in America.

What are we now? Modernist? Postmodernist? How about metamodernist?

The Metamodernist Manifesto by Luke Turner BY_NC_SA

1. We recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world.
2. We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child.
3. Movement shall henceforth be enabled by way of an oscillation between positions, with diametrically opposed ideas operating like the pulsating polarities of a colossal electric machine, propelling the world into action.
4. We acknowledge the limitations inherent to all movement and experience, and the futility of any attempt to transcend the boundaries set forth therein. The essential incompleteness of a system should necessitate an adherence, not in order to achieve a given end or be slaves to its course, but rather perchance to glimpse by proxy some hidden exteriority. Existence is enriched if we set about our task as if those limits might be exceeded, for such action unfolds the world.
5. All things are caught within the irrevocable slide towards a state of maximum entropic dissemblance. Artistic creation is contingent upon the origination or revelation of difference therein. Affect at its zenith is the unmediated experience of difference in itself. It must be art’s role to explore the promise of its own paradoxical ambition by coaxing excess towards presence.
6. The present is a symptom of the twin birth of immediacy and obsolescence. Today, we are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. The new technology enables the simultaneous experience and enactment of events from a multiplicity of positions. Far from signalling its demise, these emergent networks facilitate the democratisation of history, illuminating the forking paths along which its grand narratives may navigate the here and now.
7. Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists might assume a quest for truth. All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense.
8. We propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!