A Public Space is an independent, nonprofit publisher of an award-winning literary magazine and A Public Space Books. Additional programs include fellowships for writers and editors; online classes and workshops; and the reading series APS Together. Learn more here.
In connection with the Editorial Fellowship at A Public Space, we are pleased to announce an open call for a special portfolio in the magazine to be edited by Theodore Heil.
In/Through/Of: Process: What happens when an artist or writer tries to put an image or idea into words? What happens to writing as it moves from the first draft and revisions to the final realization?
This open call is looking for writing on the idea of process. What is a process in writing, what does it look like to process through writing, and what does it mean to take chances in the process of writing.
Send me your Künstlerroman, your craft talks and anti-craft talks, your ars poeticas and anti-ars poeticas. Send me your revolutionary artist’s statement, your experimental method, your innovation on the discussion of process. Send me what happens between the blank canvas and the painting on the wall; what happens between the first page of a notebook and a final draft; what happens between the hum and a song.
Eligibility: Only writers who have not yet published or been contracted to write a book-length work with a U.S. publisher are eligible. Writers who have self-published, published an academic text, published a book with a publisher outside the U.S., or translated another writer’s work are eligible to apply. Writers who have published a chapbook in the U.S. are ineligible to apply. International applicants are encouraged to apply. Work that incorporates multiple languages is eligible, so long as the primary language is English. Only one submission per person is allowed. A Public Space reserves the right to invite submissions.
Timeline: Submissions will be accepted via Submittable from July 14, 2025–July 28, 2025. Submissions close at 11:59 p.m. (ET) on July 28, 2025. All submissions will receive a reply by the end of August.
Submission Requirements: Submissions are only accepted through Submittable. There is no submission fee. Please submit the following:
— A cover letter, including a short biographical statement and a brief note (1-3 sentences) on the connection of your piece to the open call.
— One previously unpublished piece up to 6,000 words, double spaced, or up to five (5) poems.
— Simultaneous submissions are allowed.
Note that we only accept PDF or Word files (.doc and .docx). Please do not include your cover letter as part of your manuscript.
Questions? Write Editorial Fellow Theodore Heil at theodore@apublicspace.org.
Recommended Reading: Below are selections from A Public Space’s archive that were among my references in developing this open call. These pieces are part of this month’s Public Access—work from the magazine’s archive—made free and open to all. I have included some pieces from elsewhere as well.
Jean-Paul de Dadelsen, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
Observe, as if it were the whole world at once, / An object, slight and domestic, for example / This cup.
“Summer Luncheon for Painters and Sculptors”
F.T. Marinetti, translated from the Italian by Elsbeth Pancrazi
After a long period of repose, a painter or sculptor who wishes to resume his creative activities at three on a summer afternoon will try in vain to excite inspiration with a traditional, succulent lunch.
David Lynch, interviewed by Robert Cozzolino
I get ideas, and—in the ideas that I fall in love with—that happens to be sometimes an idea possibly having to do with revealing something hidden....
“So You Think I’m the Prometheus of the Literary World”
Lucian, translated from the Greek by Keith Sidwell
What people admire [in my work] is its bit and purple saddle. Even the fact that it's made up of two absolutely splendid things, dialogue and comedy, I mean, will be insufficient to create beauty, unless the mixture is also harmonious and measured. Because, you know, it's perfectly possible to produce something grotesque out of mixing two lovely things together.
“A Short Tractate On Fine Art”
Yordanka Beleva, translated from the Bulgarian by Izidora Angel
The collective canvas of farewell. After it’s framed, the painting is lowered into storage, but the exhibition continues. It will last as long as there is someone to talk about it.
From Elsehwere
“Borges and I” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the original Spanish by James E. Irby
I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.
“Nude on a Horsehair Sofa” by Matthea Harvey
from E-Verse Radio
& me, I’m avoiding / the subject, still fretting over how to paint / the word ‘sometimes’
In connection with the Editorial Fellowship at A Public Space, we are pleased to announce an open call for a special portfolio in the magazine to be edited by Yasmin Bashir.
Contamination
Like finger-sucking in public, contamination can be alluring. The act of being made impure. For this open call I am seeking writing across genres. Writing that is mischievous in tone, difficult to digest; not necessarily explicit but coarse. Submissions might consider: What political, aesthetic, or technological systems demand our purity? How do we use art to resist this demand? What happens when we layer language across and against itself rather than organize it? What emerges when we abandon cleanliness in favor of friction, seepage, or mess?
Eligibility: Only writers who have not yet published or been contracted to write a book-length work with a U.S. publisher are eligible. Writers who have self-published, published an academic text, published a book with a publisher outside the U.S., or translated another writer’s work are eligible to apply. Writers who have published a chapbook in the U.S. are ineligible to apply. International applicants are encouraged to apply. Work that incorporates multiple languages is eligible, so long as the primary language is English. Only one submission per person is allowed. A Public Space reserves the right to invite submissions.
Timeline: Submissions will be accepted via Submittable from July 14, 2025–July 28, 2025. Submissions close at 11:59 p.m. (ET) on July 28. All submissions will receive a reply by the end of August.
Submission Requirements: Submissions are only accepted through Submittable. There is no submission fee. Please submit the following:
— A cover letter, including a short biographical statement and
— One previously unpublished piece up to 6,000 words, double-spaced, or up to five (5) poems.
— Simultaneous submissions are allowed.
Note that we only accept PDF or Word files (.doc and .docx). Please do not include your cover letter as part of your manuscript.
Questions? Write Editorial Fellow Yasmin Bashir at yasmin@apublicspace.org
Recommended Reading: Below are selections from A Public Space’s archive that were among my references in developing this open call. These pieces are part of this month’s Public Access—work from the magazine’s archive, made free and open to all. I’ve included some pieces from elsewhere as well.
Mónica de la Torre
Thank you for allowing me this public intimacy. I’m intrigued by the you I’ve conjured here. You keep haunting these words.
Jordana Maisie
Typically, surface is understood as the outward appearance, but like the wall, surface is not an independent element. It has thickness, and this thickness is both physical and metaphorical.
“Tongue Out (Beginning with a Line by the Painter Francis Bacon)”
Robert Fernandez
As if I’d drunk deeply at the roulette wheel / And bathed in its multicolored fogs, / As if I’d sweated through my shirt / Next to the colossal/Stones of the casino fireplace.
“Tipping”
LaToya Watkins
I’m full of tears and bile. That’s all I got.
D.A. Powell
Silent the approach, a fawn, fluid through the damp grass, the current in the full creek surrounding the mossy rocks, pulling them a spell a little ways downstream, inevitable their deposit.
FROM ELSEWHERE
“Ash Wednesday” by Samuel R. Delany
from Boston Review
The clean, clear ending that society keeps looking for is impossible to find. New kinds of social formations are always growing up, even within the most rigid that already seem to contain us.
“Lotion” by Simone White
from Harper’s Magazine
On my knees now, I perform an act of penitence; in that this dirt has been discovered and named and pointed to, I am humiliated; in that suggestions have been made regarding the method of its eradication too I am humiliated.
Join us for a long weekend of workshops, literary talks, and evening events at A Public Space's 2025 Weekend Writers' Retreat with Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York.
The APS Weekend Writers' Retreat is an opportunity to nurture new work and expand and explore technique. The retreat will include morning workshops with limited participants (5 to 7 per workshop); afternoon literary talks; and an array of evening events, including readings and a Saturday BBQ. There will also be opportunities for informal conversations with authors and editors and independent generative exercises, as well as complimentary tickets to events at Kaatsbaan's Annual Festival.
The retreat will be held in person from Thursday, September 11 - Sunday, September 14, the first weekend of Kaatsbaan’s Annual Festival. Tivoli is in New York's Hudson Valley, about two hours from New York City and one hour from Albany. Participants have the option of staying on-site at Kaatsbaan, or off-site. There are several inns and hotels in the area. On-site participants will stay in Kaatsbaan's Dancers' Inn, which provides motel-style accommodations, bucolic views and private baths.
Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. There is no fee to apply. Applicants must be 21 years of age by September 1, 2024, to apply. Capacity is limited, and applying early is recommended.
TUITION
Tuition is due on acceptance. Retreat participants will receive notice of acceptance, with a link to submit payment.
- Resident (lodging on site at Kaatsbaan and meals included): $1,675
- Non-Resident (lodging off site; attending workshops, lectures and meals in person at Kaatsbaan): $1,475
WORKSHOPS
- J. Mae Barizo: Mapping the Moment
In this multi-genre workshop we'll explore how writing can capture and elucidate the complexity of the world we live in, generating new work that reimagines language and experience in profound ways. Participants will have the opportunity to submit work beforehand (max. 5 pages) and have the work critiqued in class; and through generative exercises and memory work, we’ll also investigate strategies for publishing and revising. We'll examine how writers build the world of the poem, story or essay, communicating the ineffable and the everyday. The aim of the workshop is to create the circumstances that might allow you to create the strongest work of your writing life.
J. Mae Barizo is a prize-winning poet, essayist, and multi-disciplinary artist. A 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, she is the author of Tender Machines, The Cumulus Effect, and a forthcoming book of essays. She is on the faculty of the Creative Writing MFA at The New School and lives in New York City.
- Mary-Beth Hughes: How to Pass, Kick, Run and Fall
Merce Cunningham describes himself in 1965 as a practical man who will make a simple dance set to stories written and read aloud by his friend John Cage. (How to…) The stories will begin at one-minute intervals, no matter how long they are. Ah, practicality. What results is something of beauty (to this beholder.)
An interval of decades and Deborah Hay invites her friend Robert Rauschenberg to illustrate a What-if statement for making dance, playing with dance. He sends her words like: filters, history, now.
This seems a good moment to explore How-tos and What-ifs and creative friendships. Our workshop will be an opportunity to play and experiment with narrative movement. It will be generative, with lots of in-class exercises and homework. I suggest you bring something you’ve been working on for a while: a shaggy-dog story that feels a bit too shaggy, or a novel long underway, sometimes on fire, sometimes napping. Or interconnected stories that live half in imagination, half on the page. We’ll gather some of these characters, themes, progressions and put them through some new paces.
Also, please think of an artist whose work you love: Virginia Woolf and Robert Caro, for instance, quite far apart in sensibility, both enamored with Anthony Trollope. Merce Cunningham loved Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Fred Astaire, and cats. Louise Glück loved Henning Mankell. You might bring a page, image, track, clip from the artist (or two) whose work is especially, perhaps irrationally, beautiful to you.
Mary-Beth Hughes is a novelist and story writer. Her most recent work is The Ocean House. On artistic affinities and friendships, a short list: Changes: Notes on Choreography by Merce Cunningham and My Body, the Buddhist by Deborah Hay. Also, Rachel Cohen’s wonderful A Chance Meeting.
- Samantha Hunt: The Atlas of Everything
Many narratives function like sportscars or a hunter’s heart-seeking arrow. They move swiftly, without meandering, to their target: the end. Ursula K. LeGuin wrote, “I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks, spears, and swords…but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. A novel is a medicine bundle. That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.” In this generative weekend workshop, we will consider mapmaking and atlas building as a model for creating container narratives. An atlas holds thousands of routes that interlace and cross, some of them, are even non-heroic. When we write in a cartographic model, there is even the possibility that we might get lost (from los, a disbanding of our armies.) We will focus on one thing. We will question borders, boundaries, and the plurality of personhood. Fernando Pessoa wrote, “I know myself only as a symphony.” We will look at gorgeous maps, stories, and essays as we begin writing our own atlases, considering macro and miniature worlds; the simultaneity of history, memory, the present, and the future. We will get lost and know time’s relative speeds, walking the world as psychogeographists, reawakened to wonder.
Samantha Hunt’s books include the novels The Seas, The Invention of Everything Else, and Mr. Splitfoot; the story collection The Dark Dark, and a collection of essays, The Unwritten Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages.
- Robert Sullivan: Reading and Writing Landscapes
In this workshop we’ll use maps and drawings to consider how we picture ourselves in places and how places help us see where we are. The session will be a chance to unpack our awareness of where we are and maybe momentarily re-wire how we perceive places. We’ll read poems, prose fragments, and almanacs that touch New York Harbor (Nancy Holt, Joseph Mitchell, and Diane Burns) and the Hudson River Valley (Washington Irving, Robert Boyle), and we’ll make a short survey of Tivoli—no survey preparation required, no previous survey experience necessary—in order to jump start our own re-surveys of the places we see everyday. For the last session, we’ll discuss a novella about summer. We’ll generate a few things in class but it won’t be so much about critiquing as experimenting and, if we’re lucky, having some fun.
Robert Sullivan is the author of eight books, including The Meadowlands, Rats, and My American Revolution, and, most recently, Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer. He is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2025 recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a contributing editor at A Public Space. He lives in Philadelphia.
- Peter Trachtenberg: On Difficulty and Attention:
“The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.”—Simone Weil
All good writing arises from concentrated attention. For most of us, in thrall to the nonstop peep show of the Internet, such attention is extremely difficult. This workshop seeks to restore your capacity for that difficulty through generative writing prompts, readings from texts by Simone Weil, Sallie Tisdale, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and critical engagement with your own writing, with a focus on what you may have missed seeing in earlier drafts. We’ll be looking both inward, at the sources of your story, and outward, at the physical and social world that writing seeks to reflect and illuminate—and maybe even transform.
In this workshop, participants’ manuscripts (15-20 pages in Word, double spaced and paginated) will be critiqued. There will be opportunities for generative exercises as well.
Peter Trachtenberg’s books include 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities, Another Insane Devotion, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York. He is an associate professor emeritus in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, and a Bellagio residency.
APPLICATION
Please submit the following:
—A work sample of five (5) to ten (10) pages
—A cover letter (not more than two (2) pages) that includes a bio, brief artist's statement, and your writing goals for the retreat.
Note that we only accept PDF or Word files (.doc and .docx). Incomplete applications will not be considered.
Questions? Write office@apublicspace.org