The Canelands Magazine

The Canelands is a new magazine affiliated with the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. As a magazine of ideas, we seek intelligent, provocative, and complex essays that employ reason to better understand the world.

 

Love: issue 1 available (summer 2024)

Issue 1 of The Canelands is now in available! Print copies can be found on the 13th floor of POT and at The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in downtown Lexington. Grab this inaugural issue to read these thought-provoking essays about love:

Download a complete digital copy 

Editorial team: Beth Connors-Manke, Grace Medley, and Kelsey Watson

Design team: David Crosby, Aubrey Lightner, and Abigail Peake 

 

Embodiment: issue 2 call for submissions (summer 2024)

We are naturally embodied creatures. Yet, we live in an age that is, paradoxically, exceedingly material and increasingly disembodied. While digital culture may encourage the amputation of body from mind, the impulse to cleave the two is actually an old one. Throughout history, individuals and philosophies have pursued this divorce. But why is embodiment—the union of body and soul—such an uneasy marriage? What would make our embodiment more tolerable, if not harmonious? These are the guiding questions for issue 2 of The Canelands.

Theme

We welcome submissions that consider embodiment philosophically and descriptively. Especially encouraged are essays that touch on the following topics or motifs:

  • The nature of embodiment and its necessity
  • What it means to be conscious, organic, and rational
  • What nature teaches us about embodiment
  • The consequences of disembodiment for individuals, families, the polis, the natural world
  • What it means to make with hands rather than machines
  • Pregnancy, birth; illness, death
  • Sensory experience and artistic endeavor
  • Children and embodiment; the elderly and embodiment

Genre

Whatever the stylistic approach to the theme, submissions should reach for insights that extend beyond subjective experience or simply perform cultural critique. 

Blended genre essays, as well as reviews of books or media related to the theme, are welcome. If you are considering writing a review, please query us about the book or media first. In that query, be sure to explain in detail how the artifact under review is relevant to the issue’s theme.

Please note that The Canelands does not currently publish fiction, poetry, or pure memoir. While an essay may incorporate narrative, the larger drive of the piece should be critically or philosophically minded discussion.

If you have questions about theme or genre, please contact us at the email address below.

Format and Length

All manuscripts should be submitted electronically in a .docx file. Essays should be between 500 and 5,000 words. Reviews may be between 500 and 1,500 words.

Submission

All essays must be original to the human author; no AI-generated submissions will be accepted. At this time, we do not allow simultaneous submissions. 

Please email submissions and questions to thecanelandsmagazine@gmail.com.

Submission Deadline: January 1, 2025

 

 

CLOSED CALLS

Love: issue 1 call for submissions (spring 2023)

Our inaugural issue is thematically centered on love, which author Diane Ackerman calls “the great intangible.” In A Natural History of Love, Ackerman writes, “[Love] is a wholesome violence. Common as childbirth, love seems rare nonetheless, always catches one by surprise, and cannot be taught. Each child rediscovers it, each couple redefines it, each parent reinvents it. People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes.” Across time, writers and thinkers have sketched their own maps to that lost city. The ancient Greeks described kinds of love: eros, philia, storge, agape. Some theologians have defined love as willing the good of the other. Still others describe love as dropping into the deep present.

Theme

We welcome submissions that consider love philosophically and descriptively. Especially encouraged are essays that touch on the following topics or motifs:

  • Genealogies of love: familial, cultural, or historical
  • Love and attention
  • Friendship and its value in culture and politics
  • Love amidst catastrophe
  • What genres tell us—or don’t tell us—about love
  • Love as gratuity, hospitality, gift
  • Pedagogies of love
  • Love and obsession
  • Self-emptying love (kenosis) with its limits and opportunities 
  • Love in middle age and old age

 

Submissions are now closed for issue 1.