The Perch, a Yale creative arts journal with a broad mental health theme, announces its call for submissions for a special 2020 issue, in collaboration with the Mental Health Foundation and Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.
The View From Here
No “single narrative” can capture the essence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests against racism taking place around the globe. Instead, there are many narratives from people in different places with distinct identities, whose voices, experiences, and visions, taken together, might give us a glimmer of the moment we’re living through.
The current public health crisis and the heightened dialogue on racism—racism embedded systematically and historically in societies, experienced individually as microaggressions, and in other forms—are challenging us to re-envision our concepts of community. In response, The Perch, a project of the Program for Recovery & Community Health of Yale University, USA, is launching its first-ever transatlantic issue in partnership with the Mental Health Foundation, a leading UK charity that works to prevent mental health problems and produces the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, the largest of its kind in the world.
For this special issue—“The View from Here”—we invite writers, visual artists, and musicians to share original work they’ve created during and in relation to this time we are living in. We are looking for new, original work created during this ‘moment,’ starting around March 15 2020.
Please do not pull out an old canvas or an old file on your computer and repaint, revise, re-record, or re-edit for this submission. Instead, sit down with a blank page or sit at your instrument and invent something new. We want to know what you (or your fictional creations) are seeing, hearing, feeling, and going through right now. We want to know how your life has changed in the last few months, even in the last few weeks.
We seek brief, immediate visual arts, musical, and literary portraits of what it is like to live in this age right now.
“The View from Here” will have two sections, and we invite submissions in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, visual art, and music for both:
1. Present – immediate reflections on the “now”
2. Future – imagining what’s “next”— where will we go from here?
There is no need to specify which section you are submitting to.
The deadline for submissions is 31 July 2020.
Submissions should be made online here. Please email Gail at galdam@mentalhealth.org.uk with any questions about the submission.