Call for Submissions: Physical Culture, on Feminism & Fitness

From the editors of the next DELIRIOUS HEM feature, a call for submissions: 

This is an open call for submissions for an online and print anthology about women and fitness/exercise co-edited by me (Elizabeth Hall) and the lovely Amanda Montei. The online portion of the project will appear at Delirious Hem late this summer followed by a print anthology with a tentative 2015 release.

The goal of the anthology is to chart a modern physical culture from a broad range of perspectives. We are especially interested in exploring the intersections between feminism and fitness. We feel the topic is ripe for interpretation and re-interpretation. In that sense, we are not only interested in texts that explore our current physical culture, but ones that also reformulate and re-conceive it.

We are as interested in pieces about yoga and dance as we are urban bike culture and guerrilla street fitness, or any way a woman might choose or refuse to “work,” live in, or care for, her body. We hope to see texts that tease us, poke and prod, and interrogate the very meaning of “fitness” and/or complicate accepted narratives and norms of exercise and female empowerment. We welcome all forms—poems, short stories, nonfiction, scholarly texts, works of historiography, collaborations, interviews, whatever.

Send up to 5 poems or up to 5,000 words and a short bio to delirioushem1 [at] gmail [d0t] com by July 25th, 2014. 

414 ('Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch)

'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,
That nearer, every Day,
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel
Until the Agony

Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem—
And you dropt, lost,
When something broke—
And let you from a Dream—

As if a Goblin with a Gauge—
Kept measuring the Hours—
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws—

And not a Sinew—stirred—could help,
And sense was setting numb—
When God—remembered—and the Fiend
Let go, then, Overcome—

As if your Sentence stood—pronounced—
And you were frozen led
From Dungeon's luxury of Doubt
To Gibbets, and the Dead—

And when the Film had stitched your eyes
A Creature gasped "Reprieve"!
Which Anguish was the utterest—then—
To perish, or to live? 

Emily Dickinson

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