The Biannual Skinny

Photo by Czar Kristoff

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Biannual Skinny is not the first of anything. It’s just a zine for the arts. It’s just a small group of friends answering a question many creators have asked, at one point or another: “Where do I publish my work now?”

Of course, we’re not saying there’s nowhere to publish your work. There are plenty of fantastic places to go to look for good poetry, screenplays, art, and the like. In fact, these days, even just following the right people on tumblr will do. What we are asserting is that there are audiences that enjoy good art—people who know how to appreciate good art—but don’t necessarily know what they like, or where to look for it: visual artists who actually really like personal essays, poets who haven’t necessarily been introduced to the kind of paintings that may inspire their next work, accountants who may need a small dose of art in their lives.

The Biannual Skinny is our small effort to connect. It’s the mixtape we want to send out to the world. Art alters world views, and the Philippines is full of it. We want the B.S. to be something one can flip open expecting works that embody the Filipino’s inherent urge to create—works that dazzle, that baffle, that disgust, that stir thought and stimulate talk about things that are important to our being human.

We are looking for text-based work. We want your stories, your essays, your long-form features about robotics or yoyo culture, your poems, and your screenplays; we want that text document you’ve been working on that you don’t know what to call. If we think it deserves to be seen, we’ll publish it. For stories, essays, and similar texts, we have a soft cap of 4,000 words. We know that discerning what to publish is an incredibly subjective process, and biases can’t be completely erased, but we’ll go about it in the fairest way we know how.

And since money matters can be messy, we’d like to clarify this as early as possible: Even though we’d like to, the Biannual Skinny can’t pay for your work. Yes, we will be selling the issues in which accepted work will be published, but only so we don’t lose money. Any profit we make will be put into the production of the next issue. We understand that all submissions of work, then, are acts of trust on the part of our contributors, and what we can do is give contributors a copy of the zine they’re published in, and have something to show for what we end up charging—good printing, good design, and distribution that makes the B.S. accessible to as many people as possible.

Submissions can be e-mailed to: thebiannualskinny@gmail.com
Deadline: April 2, 2015