Call for submission: Magma 98, Doubt

We are excited to be inviting submissions for Magma 98: the Doubt issue.

We want you to explore doubt from a range of different angles and perspectives. This could mean poems that explore doubt in the truth. Is there something you’ve never quite accepted as fact, an uncertainty that’s continued to sit with you?

You could be inspired by a long-held family belief, that conversation about your great-grandmother at the dinner table, a neighbourhood rumour. Or by the question of whether that photo or video you’re looking at is legitimate or AI-generated, a larger uncertainty about how we’re perceiving the world.

You may want to respond to doubt as an experience. What is the physical sensation of doubt? Where does it sit in your body? How does a doubtful tongue speak? How do doubtful legs move through the day?

The deepest rooted dream
of a tree is to walk, even just a little way.
A phobia is a ritual of not-doing. It did not
feel like a ritual but an injunction
from a distant government, one we
forgot we’d voted for.
– Emily Berry, From “Unexhausted Time”

We are interested in the variations of doubt, how it shapeshifts, how it changes in rain, how it runs towards the bus stop or away from something.

We want to know how doubt behaves when it’s left alone, where it sleeps, the noises it makes in the dark, how it moves and takes up space. What it tells you in the quiet moments, how it speaks as you stand on a busy street looking out.

Since our separation I have been spilling
ink on lined pages, wondering what stopped
working when the plates were put away and
how many times we asked with water in our eyes
what we wanted if it wasn’t art on the wall
in the house by the sea?
– Raymond Antrobus, Dynamic Disks, 1933

You may not want to approach doubt as an inhibitor. What happens when you venture into unknown territory, moving beyond the uncertainty of whether your work will be recognised or your pursuit will ultimately achieve its goal? Perhaps you’re drawn to the trendsetters, the pioneers who overcame doubt to be the first to do it, and the ramifications of their success. Then there is the wider contrast between doubt and certainty. We exist in a time when growing numbers of leaders offer increasingly brutal brands of ‘certainty’ and, in many cases, imply that certainty about them and their leadership is more important than any particular ideas or principles they are putting forward.

We’re interested in poems that express what we don’t know – and explore the answers that are currently (and, in some cases, may always be) out of reach.

Including the biggest doubts of all: the great questions of our existence, such as whether there is an afterlife or a higher power beyond us, or the existence of a wider universe.

Send us poems that find language for, and bring into being, things which feel unknowable.

Katie Dunstan, David Floyd, and Francis-Xavier Mukiibi, editors, Magma 98

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How to Submit

We welcome poems that have not been previously published in print, online, or broadcast.

We accept simultaneous submissions, but please withdraw your submission or contact us if it is accepted for publication somewhere else first.

You may submit up to 4 previously unpublished poems: ONLINE via Submittable in a single Word document, OR BY POST to Magma 96 Submissions, 23 Pine Walk, Carshalton, SM5 4ES. Postal submissions are accepted from the UK and Ireland only. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made.

Please read full Submissions Guidelines here.