THE CROW’S NEST: SPYING FOR CONTRIBUTORS
We are looking for staffed and occasional writers with strong and personable voices to contribute to The Crow’s Nest!
Here’s what we’re looking for:
- Anything about the sea! We especially love classic lit and gothic seas with themes of oceans/pirates/sailing as well as longing, romance, revenge, terror, horror, the sublime and MORE.
- short limericks for Filthy Limerick Friday
- Sonnets for Sea-Sonnet Sunday
- Your top five most beloved Sea Shanties
- Sea related music and how it makes you feel!
- The gothic and monstrous sea in film and lit (Shape of Water, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Moby Dick, Black Sails, OFMD…)
- Instructionals for the best sailing life: sailors’ knots, semaphore, the perfect corncob pipe…
- mermen, sirens, and selkies and their lore from a variety of cultures. Alternatively, books that deal really well with using these themes to talk about queerness, neurodivergence, and disabled bodies. Your Hans Christian Andersen hot takes are much appreciated.
- Your first experience on the open seas
- How to be kind to seagulls (or how not to fear them!)
- Marine life
- Race, culture, and counterculture and the sea/sailing/pirates
- Neurodivergence and sailing
- Short meditations on the sea and yourself
But don’t feel boxed in by the nautical theme, we’re looking for the landlocked contributor with the oceanic imagination too! We’re also happy to see:
- food and ocean related themes– we love food reviews and love how themes can cross over here. If you want to review a restaurant, dish, food truck, or send us your ocean-themed creations we love it.
- Interviews with anyone sea/water related (or if you want to be interviewed!)
- Water in Taylor Swift songs and how it emphasizes the sublime/queerness etc.,
- Water and Queerness in Jane Austen novels
- Van Gogh’s Water’s and queerness (Please, talk to us about paintings. We are literally begging.)
- Indigenous cultures, queerness, and water/oceans
Above all, your ocean/water theme can be fast and loose– We love to hear new ideas. we realize not everyone are nautical freaks like us, so we invite you to broaden our horizons! Want to write about queer waters in your bathtub? or how tears the primary source of water in a scene and therefore connected to the sea? We want to hear it! Your windswept gothic mansion just so happens to overlook an ocean or lake? fantastic! Your green forested knights and princes that usually get it on just so happen to stumble upon an enchanted river? We’ll certainly go with the flow, just don’t leave us high and dry.
Email us at westofcanon@gmail.com With the type of contributor in the title. Drop us a line, a short list or a couple hundred words of what you would want to contribute. Blog posts will vary in length of course, but we are looking for shorter to moderate reads, not quite The Old Man and The Sea.