Emergence Magazine

Pitches & Submissions

We’re looking for stories that explore the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

We’re interested in both local and global stories that are in-depth and narrative-focused. We consider long-form content as well as shorter, time-sensitive pieces that offer a more immediate response to current events. This includes: essays, op-eds, poetry, films, photography, multimedia, and audio stories. We only consider unpublished works or online premieres for film, photography, and multimedia. Being familiar with the work we publish can help you see if your story will align with our editorial impulse.

We publish content weekly online and via our podcast. Our annual print edition features a selection of content previously published online as well as work commissioned specifically for print.

In addition to general pitches and submissions, we are interested in new work that explores the following themes:

  • Time. For centuries standardized, mechanized time has imposed a sense of order on the world around us. A tool to control direction, production, and progress, this conception of time has become the backbone of our reality, placing history behind us and entraining our consciousness towards bounded futures. Yet our present moment increasingly refuses to inhabit time as we know it. Around the world, familiar cycles of time are rupturing: buds bloom “too early,” winters don’t quite arrive; time bends as long-buried carbons emerge to haunt the future. And as doomsday clocks strike ever closer to midnight, and we race towards an impending climate catastrophe, there are many who are searching for ways to unhitch themselves from the accelerating and finite time of modern life. If we instead tuned into the rhythms of the living world, what forms of time might we find in rays of light, the stories of stones, the movement of birds and rivers, or the pulse of our own bodies? Freed from the clutch of the minute hand, we can step into spaces of time—ancestral time, deep time, circular time—in which histories are present, moments come alive, and new futures become possible.
  • Ecology of Intelligence. So deep-rooted is the belief that intelligence belongs solely to humans that we have equated its definition with humanness. Insular and hubristic, this has meant we only recognize intelligence that resembles our own. Yet in the face of our ecological unraveling, the false hierarchies and categorizations that have perpetuated our separation from the living world are fracturing, opening us up to the existence of entirely different forms of intelligence. As we begin to recognize that every sentient being occupies a unique sensory landscape that engenders a place-specific perception of the world, how might we connect with these wider bodies of knowledge? As we wade into the uncharted possibilities of artificial intelligence, will we be mindful of the intelligence biases and inequalities we are encoding into it? What opportunities does the present moment hold for engaging in collaboration with a multitude of intelligences? What might a cross-species curriculum of knowledge look like? What might be learnt in an exchange of enlightenments between human and landscape? Within such an entanglement with the more-than-human world, how might we reimagine our limited ways of knowing into an ecology of intelligence?

    To learn about our submission requirements and to submit, click on the button below which will take you to our Submittable page.


    Click here to submit

10 10