Blog Topic: Announcements

Spectrum Literary Journal is currently open for submissions, and for Volume 67 we will be observing and transgressing binaries.

Spectrum is an annual publication of art and literature based out of UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies. For the past 66 years, the magazine has celebrated a spectrum of voices, genres, and topics reflective of the wide range of human experiences, from both new and established writers. We’re particularly passionate about work that defies, bends, or manipulates genre, and we welcome submissions of prose, poetry, visual art, and hybrid literary forms.

Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work

- Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Ch. 11, transl. Red Pine

This excerpt from the Tao Te Ching guides the theme of Spectrum’s Volume 67, along with the following questions: How do existence and nonexistence play in unison? What necessitates emptiness and the environments that shape it? What other dualities are observable? Additionally, what are the limitations of binarism and how can we transgress them? Some submissions might explicitly respond to Lao-Tzu's ideas or address the aforementioned questions, while others might disjoint structure and form as a testament to the transgressions we are seeking to publish. We urge you to come forward with stories that rupture the quotidian and shake free the tethers that restrain us from living as our truest selves. Even a glance that lingers too long can be a story of imprisonment or freedom (or some third thing). We look forward to reading what you have to say about this.

Please click here to familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines and to submit your work. Thank you!

Sasha Senal (she/her/they/them)

Editor-in-Chief of Vol. 67

Hello, writers and artists!

Spectrum invites you to submit your writing, art, or anything in between to be considered for inclusion in our 66th volume.

We welcome your weirdest and cherish your not-weirdest. Send us that story you have lovingly developed. Send us poems that take us out of our busy everydays because they demand we be still, demand we listen. Send us art that translates the experiential into the visual in ways we've never seen before; essays that leave us wondering; and works that blend, complicate, or transcend genre. Send us art and writing that represents some part of the broad spectrum of human emotions and experiences.

Our reading period for Vol. 66 opens July 1st and closes December 31st. We accept poetry, prose, art, and hybrid pieces.  Learn more and submit here.

--Lila V. Singh, Editor-in-Chief

Dear all undergraduate writers and artists at UCSB,

For the first time, Spectrum is publishing an edition composed solely of work by UCSB’s students, and as such, I heartily invite you to send us your creations between now and August 20, 2021 to be considered for Spectrum’s Summer Edition! We will review your work and send out decisions at the end of the month, with publication planned for mid-September, 2021.

And, we do mean that we want you! No matter your major, no matter if you’ve won awards or never shared your words, we want to read (or see) your work! Submit us your best work, but don’t shy away even if you don’t think that your work is “the best.”

For this fresh and new summer edition, we’re also welcoming a wider variety of submissions: as always, send us your poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and visual art, but also send us your scripts, your hybrid work, your multimedia, your comics, your dance, anything—if think we might like it, send it! We want to capture the full spectrum of creative expression, and will review everything you submit, so long as it meets our basic guidelines.

Don’t feel restricted by format, either—though Spectrum is traditionally a printed journal, this summer edition will instead be published online, on this very website, so we welcome works which might not conform to the page, or be static, at all. If still in doubt, feel free to email us!

Learn more and submit here. 

Then, after you’ve submitted that, make sure to spread the word! Send our submission form to all of your UCSB friends, for us—we can only reach so far, but with your help, we hope to find and reach all of UCSB who has to offer, to reach a full spectrum of us.

— Kat Yuen, Editor-in-Chief