Vol. 70 Call For Submissions
Spectrum Literary Journal is currently open for submissions. For volume 70, we invite you to explore the artistry of hamartia.
Spectrum is a national journal of art and literature that is annually published by UCSB’s College of Creative Studies. The publication was founded in 1957, marking it as one of the oldest literary journals in the UC system. Through a broad range of genres and subject-matters, Spectrum aims to showcase both the scope and depth of human experience.
The word hamartia derives from the Greek ἁμαρτία, from ἁμαρτάνειν hamartánein, meaning “to miss the mark” or “to err”, but we’re allured by blurry definitions of what is, essentially, the idea that a force could be so terrible it shakes and tumbles its own scaffolding. If every text is a dollhouse, hamartia is the hand that turns it upside down and shakes all the furniture out. We invite you to engage with hamartia not only as a medium for tragedy but as a disruptive force ironically and inescapably intertwined with the story, poem, essay, or work of art itself–similar to how a cracked bowl is both its body and its fracturing. We seek stories, essays, poetry and artwork felled by fatal flaws that wrestle with their forms: texts that question where they begin and end, texts that are painfully aware of what they can do and what they cannot. Once you shake out all of the furniture within the dollhouse, what does the empty space hold?
Reflecting on seven decades of Spectrum, we find it a perpetual hamartia; a dollhouse with its furniture on the ceiling and paint peeling in different colors. We also find, just as persistently, the devotion of its editors, students, and staff holding the house together anyway. Just as it’s a destructive force, hamartia is also a kind of devotion: what else could we call this steadfastness that pitches into madness anything but faith? So in honor of our seventieth year, we also invite you to explore the devotional side of hamartia. When does devotion become a fatal flaw?
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Please click here to familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines and to submit your work. All work selected for volume 70 will be considered for the CCS Spectrum Awards, funded by CCS Alumnus Marc Louria '76 (CCS Literature), past Editor-in-Chief of Spectrum volumes XVII & XVIII. Three awardees selected by the editorial staff of volume 70 will be provided a monetary prize of $300 each and acknowledged in the journal. We look forward to hearing from you.
Makenna Arase, Editor-in-Chief
Vol. 70