Sun Thief Journal is open to both emerging and established writers to publish poetry, short stories, and critical essays that interrogate the act of writing itself and reflect the urgency of the word in difficult times. The Journal is published twice a year on each solstice. We might have themed calls, we might not, but we’ll always be interested in the language of the question and the question of language, its contradictions and its challenges. We grasp – we fail – we continue. For us, these general themes reach toward the pith of what makes us writers.
Hélène Cixous writes: “I advance error by error, with erring steps, by the force of error. It’s suffering, but it’s joy. I seek truth, I encounter error…In us the storm is always alive, on paper, no.” “That instant which strikes between two instants…which has [only] its own shattering brilliance, the shock of the passage from night to light…This is what we draw, tripping, because, instead of throbbing, we trace. We want to throw ourselves ahead and we go backwards. Do you see these footprints? We are advancing backwards.” [Stigmata: Escaping texts, Routledge, 2005)
Sun Thief Journal seeks to be a record of the lurching step, the advancing-backwards.
We love work that blurs boundaries between self and other, mind and world, writer and text. We value well-crafted, difficult work that interrogates and grapples with its own form and process, that deals in the experience of writing/living/being, along horizons, borders, between contraries, gulfs. We’re “translation-forward”, meaning that even when we ask for English-language submissions, we still look for work that generally deals with the questions of “translation” writ large, re: the difficulties of speech/articulation, meaning-making, and interpretation, whether that takes the form of poetry, short fiction, or essay. Interpret as you will!
