CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
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Issue 10 Theme: Aquatic
with Guest Editor Jena Woodhouse
“We are all connected by the world’s oceans”, writes Florence Gutchen, artist, of Erub Island in the Torres Strait. Throughout human history, seafarers expanded horizons and enabled civilisations to flourish. Now, those vast bodies of water, once teeming with animal and plant life, are jeopardised by human activity on an industrial scale.
Water, fresh water, quenches the physical thirst and is essential to the survival of virtually every living organism, while the idea of water, and its imagery, replenishes the aquifers of the imagination. It encompasses the spectrum of primary sensation, pleasure and recreation, danger, awe, forces of nature, habitat, contemplation, sacred ritual, energy, travel, and other modes of experience, vicarious and actual.
Water is a shape-shifter, and may take the form of vapour, liquid, solid (as ice); clouds that return to earth as rain; tears of grief or mirth. 50 to 60 per cent of the average adult human body is comprised of water. Its possibilities are boundless. Saline and fresh water support all the Earth’s life-forms: animal and vegetable, marine, aerial and terrestrial, subterranean. “Aquatic” phenomenologies embrace every aspect and function of being, and indeed of life on Earth.
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In addition to poems inspired by the tangible and actual, imaginative interpretations of this theme are encouraged: trajectories that take the idea and associations of the aquatic beyond the traditional and literal, to creative realms that have no geographical limitations. Feel free to improvise, fantasise, visualise, explore any and every possibility suggested by this shape-shifting, limitlessly mind-expanding theme.
Jena Woodhouse
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Please make sure you follow our revised submission process.
Please make sure you read the submission guidelines and the Authora values before sending us your work.
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Issue 10 submissions close December 31, 2025 11.59pm AEDT.
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Jena Woodhouse
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Jena Woodhouse grew up in Queensland, in the Capricorn Coast hinterland. As a student, she made seven voyages to archipelagoes in the south Pacific, and later lived and worked for a decade in Greece, where she travelled extensively throughout the Aegean. The sea and marine life, particularly the humpback whales, are at the heart of her forthcoming poetry collection, The Singing Ship: A Study in Resistances (Calanthe Press, December 2025), while her unpublished poetry collection, Tidings from the Pelagos: A Polyphony, was a finalist in the Greek-based Eyelands International Book Awards in 2024. She is mindful that the health of our planet is inextricable from the health of its oceans and waterways.
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Photo credit: Anna Jacobson
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