On Freedom
Call for Submissions
Editors: DJ Lee and Michael McDermott
Assistant Editors: Rachel Sanchez and Jacob Klaung
Managing Editor: Michael McDermott
Open for submissions on June 1, 2025
Submissions due by August 1, 2025
Issue to be published October 2025
On Freedom
About Place Journal invites submissions for Volume VIII, Issue IV, “On Freedom.”
All around us, we see and hear calls for freedom from many different voices and different directions. Some of these calls are frightening; some are inspiring. How are we to understand this “freedom” moment? We seek poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual art, video, and hybrid works that question, reimagine, and embody what freedom and unfreedom mean in our complex world.
We’re looking for work that explores freedom’s multidimensional nature—what historian Timothy Snyder distinguishes as negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is “freedom from” (oppression, constraint, violence), while positive freedom is “freedom to” (create, speak, love, flourish).
We’re also interested in work that engages freedom as a process. Freedom requires cultivating “habits of freedom” (Snyder)—daily practices that sustain and expand our capacity for liberty. Author Maggie Nelson also understands freedom not as a fixed state but as an ongoing practice.
We view the act of creation itself as a habit or practice of freedom—a claiming of voice and space. We invite submissions that not only speak about freedom but express it through formal innovation, boundary-crossing, and aesthetic risk-taking.
We welcome explorations of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called “inwardness as a place of absolute freedom” as well as work that maps the external territories of political and social freedom. We’re interested in how art can articulate author bell hooks’ idea that “awareness is central to the process of love as the practice of freedom.”
We invite you to join us in the radical act of creative freedom, to challenge constraint and to imagine liberation in both bold and quiet ways.
All submissions should be previously unpublished and should engage with the theme of freedom in thoughtful and nuanced ways. We welcome work in various forms and styles, from traditional to experimental.
Work must be submitted via Submittable by August 1, 2025.
About Place Journal is committed to amplifying diverse voices and perspectives. We especially encourage submissions from writers and artists of historically marginalized communities whose experiences and insights on freedom may challenge dominant narratives and expand our collective understanding.
Issue Editors
DJ Lee
DJ Lee’s nonfiction essays and poetry have appeared in Narrative, Silk Road Review, Terrain, and elsewhere, and they have been finalists for contests and won awards. She is author/editor of eight books, both scholarly and creative, on literature, history, and the environment, including the oral history collection The Land Speaks (Oxford 2017), and a lyric memoir Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots (Oregon State 2020). She is Regents Professor at Washington State University where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is director of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project and is a scholar-advisor at The Black Earth Institute.
Michael McDermott
Michael McDermott is a retired physician who spent many years in Emergency Medicine, becoming the Director of Adult Emergency Medicine at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He was co-author on 20+ papers on improving asthma care. He retired to take a home in rural Dane County, Wisconsin, on 20 acres with an increasing portion as restored prairie. He has been a life-long activist, taking leadership positions in organizations. He met Patricia Monaghan in early 2004 and, faced with Bush’s second election, they formed the concept of the Black Earth Institute as a think tank for artists who take art in relation to spirit, earth and social justice. They launched the first group of fellows of BEI the next year. Michael’s land is named Brigit Rest after the Irish saint and goddess. Patricia died in 2012 but before that developed many projects built to promote Celtic spirituality. Michael continues as director of the Institute and is managing editor of About Place Journal.
Assistant Editors
Rachel Sanchez
Rachel Sanchez is an editor, nonfiction essayist, and teacher with a focus on marginalized identities and populations. She received her BA in Creative Writing and her MA in Nineteenth-Century Poetry from Washington State University. She most recently co-edited a collection of essays, Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure Track Faculty in Writing Studies and works as Assistant Director of Composition for WSU’s English department.
Jacob Klaung
Jacob Noah Klaung is a poet and creative nonfiction writer from Rockford, Illinois. He graduated from Loras College with a Literature and Creative Writing Degree in 2024 and now lives in Iowa with his wife Gabriella and their two dogs, Clay and Willie. His work focuses on memory, place, the natural world, and the strange. His favorite poets are Elizabeth Bishop and Frank Stanford.
About Place Journal Submission Guidelines
About Place Journal is published twice a year, in spring and fall. A new Call for Submissions is posted twice a year. Please review the current call and follow any specific genres called for in the upcoming issue.
Work can include:
- Poetry: up to 3 pieces which do not exceed 50 lines each. Acceptable file types include doc, docx, odt & rtf. If your poetry submission contains special formatting, we suggest submitting a PDF in addition to your Word doc.
- Fiction, essays, creative nonfiction and other prose: up to 3 pieces which do not exceed 4000 words each. Acceptable file types include doc, docx, odt & rtf.
- Audio/Visual artwork: up to 5 photographs, paintings, prints, or other forms of art. Acceptable file types include jpg & tif for still art; mp3, m4a, ogg & wav for audio; and avi, flv, m4v, mov, mp4, webm and wmv for video. Video and audio submissions should not exceed 10 minutes. For physical artwork, please include the size and media of each artwork with your list of works (if applicable).
- The total number of submitted pieces cannot exceed 5, even if your submission includes items from several genre categories.
Please provide a numbered list with the title of each work you are submitting (1 to 5 works) in the field of the Submittable form where indicated. If you are submitting photos of physical artwork, please include the artwork size and media, if applicable, in your list.
Each submission must be accompanied by a bio in doc, docx or rtf format. Bios must be in the third person and not exceed 150 words. If you want your website, Twitter, and/or Instagram links included with your bio, please include that information in the Submittable form.
By submitting, you guarantee you hold the rights to the work, and you grant About Place Journal the rights to publish the submitted work with first serial rights (FNASR). After publication, rights revert to the author. Original, previously unpublished work only. All pieces must be submitted through Submittable.