Submissions

The inspiration for this theme came from Nuzhat Abbas’s anthology, river in an ocean: essays on translation (trace press, 2023).

Theme editor and Serai co-founder Nilambri Ghai puts it this way:

While reading the Introduction and the essays, I felt myself drifting and changing with the flow of the rivers filling into the ocean of words and thoughts conjured up by translators, some like myself, struggling to catch the spirits within the original.

I wondered why I had never come across anything like this book, why I had not seen translation as a “crossing over” from languages, cultures, geographical boundaries and histories. Why had I not realized that I am forever “translating” and reconstructing meaning for my community, family and friends?

I recalled how I had been transported to the turn of the 20th century while translating letters from my grandmother, finding meaning and relevance today for us and for future generations. I do not think I can do justice to what the authors of essays in the book have produced. Nor can I adequately express my extreme closeness to the translators. However, I am grateful that Nuzhat Abbas at trace press has created a unique forum that communicates through decolonized languages and that translates hope for us in an increasingly disturbed world.

“Reconstructing meaning” can also reflect a movement of identities from the familiar into the unfamiliar and vice versa – a meeting of generations, a cultivation of understanding and kinship that goes beyond words or shared culture. As Yasmine Haj puts it in her essay “Rast”:

A human’s first task is to translate. As infants, we breathe air and immediately translate. To survive, we translate. In different tones, an infant articulates hunger, distress, and fatigue. In turn, their caregivers experiment, juggle interpretations, understand, translate. Translation becomes a mutual undertaking – a habit both receivers develop and an art both ends finesse. human’s first task is to translate. As infants, we breathe air and immediately translate. To survive, we translate. In different tones, an infant articulates hunger, distress, and fatigue. In turn, their caregivers experiment, juggle interpretations, understand, translate. Translation becomes a mutual undertaking – a habit both receivers develop and an art both ends finesse.

We invite you to share your poems, essays, short stories, art and multimedia pieces that address your experience around this broad theme of communicating across social, cultural, historical and geographical boundaries and barriers.

Please send us your original, unpublished work along with a short bio, indicating the theme of “Reconstructing meaning,” using the following submissions form: http://forms.gle/fm7BTUje5X4WCg56A

Editor: Nilambri Ghai

How do we, individually or collectively, grapple with ongoing genocides while many governments remain passive?

How can we find our footing after the election of Donald Trump, who seems to be setting the world so many years back, in these times of extreme uncertainty?

How do we address the worsening climate crisis and its consequences when individual actions are almost inconsequential in the face of the damaging impact of corporation?

How can we face a world that continues to threaten women’s rights, and where many still question the need for feminism and gender diverse solidarity?

As artists, writers and cultural workers, what keeps us from despair at the constant flow of pessimistic information spewed out by both traditional and social media?

How are we adapting to the accelerated rise in artificial intelligence, its limitless possibilities and dangers?

Where to find strength when confronted with a sense of overwhelming helplessness? In a world shaped by perpetual turmoil, how to cope with the ongoing maelstrom?

“Navigating Chaos” explores the everyday resilience and tenacious resistance of individuals and communities that manage to not only survive but sometimes even thrive in these turbulent times. The idea is to share reflections, strategies and solutions born from the struggle of navigating simultaneous crises. This theme offers a space where it’s possible to explore the challenges and the positive generative aspects of chaos.

We invite you to share your stories, experiences, dreams and ideas that speak to the potential for hope, adaptability and transformation through chaos.

Please submit your original, unpublished poems, prose, art, music and multimedia pieces, along with a short bio, indicating the theme “Navigating Chaos,” using the following form:

http://forms.gle/fm7BTUje5X4WCg56A

Editor: TBC

Montréal Serai is calling for submissions that interrogate capitalism’s capacity for reinvention, the costs of its mutations, and the radical visions challenging its dominance.

Capitalism is not fixed—it mutates, shape-shifting in response to crisis, technology, resistance and cultural change.

As we stand at the intersections of escalating climate disasters, rampant technological innovation, widening inequalities, the erosion of public health care, the commodification of traditional and Indigenous practices, and emerging movements for justice, it has become clear that capitalism possesses an unnerving adaptability. But as it transforms, what else mutates alongside it—our lives, labour, desires, health, wellbeing and imaginaries? And how do we resist, reclaim and reimagine amid these shifts?

Serai seeks to examine how capitalist systems survive, adapt and exploit— and the creative, critical and collective alternatives that emerge in response.

We invite writers, artists, scholars, activists and creatives to reflect on capitalism’s adaptive nature and its implications across political, cultural and environmental terrains, as well as the possibilities for alternatives that challenge its dominance.

Please send us your original, unpublished work along with a short bio, indicating the theme of “Mutating Capitalism,” using the following submissions form:

http://forms.gle/fm7BTUje5X4WCg56A

Editor: TBC

With this theme we recognize the many losses the Earth and its inhabitants have undergone. Art, legends and literature from bygone times tell a story of the drowning of the world. Historic spaces from Al-Andalus to united Punjab have been lost—sometimes to reappear in other forms. Centuries of colonialism have wreaked immeasurable losses: lands and dreams stolen and decimated, ancestral and spiritual connections severed. Indigenous peoples around the world are leading the way to recover their languages and cultural legacies for healing their communities and relationships. Millions of Palestinians whose families have been displaced from their homes since the 1948 Nakba keep alive the hope of recovering their place.

How can we grieve our lost places and envisage their recovery? By “lost space” or “lost place,” might we mean situations of conflict and reconciliation between people, minoritized histories, transphobic erasures, genocide or ecocide? How can we deal with loss or prevent it from happening further, through mourning, commemoration, celebration, imagination and resistance?

Globalization and rapid development from the 1960s on have caused innumerable spaces to give way to economic “progress.” The rising city skylines of the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea), the nail houses of China, the “modernization” of Ethiopian Piassa, and the shrinking rainforest of the Amazon are just some of the lost spaces that have been branded as inevitable collateral damage in the name of collective economic advancement. The price of this “advancement” is the on-going destruction of heritage, identity, culture, a sense of belonging, and livelihoods.

Are places only physical? Might recovering one’s place in the world mean mending relationships? Regaining one’s good name? Recovering our history? Imagining or documenting the long duration of diaspora presence on the lands of Turtle Island, in the face of calls to “go back to your country”?

Please submit your original, unpublished poems, prose, art, music and multimedia pieces, along with a short bio, and indicate the theme “Lost Spaces: Recovering our Place,” using the following submissions form:

http://forms.gle/fm7BTUje5X4WCg56A

Editor: TBC

Visual art, Photo essay, reportage
A maximum of eight photographs will be allowed in the case of visual art submissions. Acceptable file formats include .jpg, .pdf, .png and .tif.

• Minimum width: 1600px
• Maximum width: 3200px
• Max file size: 5mb

Audio & video
Videos should be in .mpg or mp4 format. Videos will be published to the Montréal Serai YouTube. Audio can be provided as .wav or .aif and will be hosted and streamed from on our local server.