I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.”
Mary Oliver, Summer Day

“To pray is to step inside the mystery of all that we do not know.”
Perdita Finn, The Mysteries of Prayer

In deciding to devote issue 20 to ‘”Prayer,” we were moved in part  by the close kinship between prayer and not-knowing. We’re issuing this call at a moment when many of us in North America cannot look away from a sky filtered by wildfire smoke while across the globe, we see flooding, deadly heat, drought. When so much that we are forced to know about the health and wellbeing of the planet can lead us to despair, the realm of possibility and mystery becomes a necessary habitat.

In her essay on Virginia Woolf’s darkness, quoted in our first editorial, Rebecca Solnit writes:“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.” How could prayer play a role in that transpiring?

Prayer can take many forms. We want to know, in as much detail as possible, what prayer is for you. What does it look, feel, sound like?  Is it an act of faith, of devotion, a gesture of yielding, of reciprocity? To whom or what do you pray and why? In these times of extinction how has the act of prayer brought change to your life?  If one of your prayers has been answered, how so?

If one purpose of prayer is to express what it means to live and persist with joy in our times – to court the numinous mystery of life – let’s share how we dance, paint, write, draw, walk, sing into the wildness of the unknown.

Send us your poems, essays, hybrid forms, flash fiction/nonfiction—we may publish a collection of short pieces.  And send us your dreams!!

DEADLINE: Friday, September 4, 2026