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Here and Everywhere



For some unforeseen reason, the wonderful folx at Apparition Lit have bestowed me with the Guest Editor title for their Wanderlust Issue, and I’m over the damn moon with excitement. General submissions are open until Feb 28, so without further ado, let’s dive in, shall we?

But first, what does wanderlust mean to you? A yearning for elsewhere when you’re rooted in place? A pulling apart of what here entails, when it is no longer a given?

These are the explorations I’d love to see in the submissions queue, in the stories and poems that come my way. Wanderlust is predominantly a feeling, and its innards can only be parsed by how you root it within your stories. As a queer, brown, immigrant woman who has lived in six countries and passed through many more, sometimes a sense of place is a cavalcade of rooms and doors and cupboards in rapid succession, a smudged mash of planes and concrete and landscapes that barely register. Sometimes placelessness is a yearning for the sea, in the way it crests and rolls right before a thunderstorm, the sky as dark as tar.

So give me your portal narratives where you slip away from the heres and end up in elsewheres that are not of this plane. Led by visions, your unknown destinations that puncture films of reality. The passages that are not of your choosing through words and worlds. The howl in the body that can only be quietened by taking a journey through terrains that are impenetrably alien, or deeply familiar, or both.

I am especially partial to unusual story structures, poetic language, and themes of unbelonging. I would specifically love to see stories from writers who are BIPOC, from historically underrepresented backgrounds, and from the Global South. And above all, stories must be undeniably speculative, and center the Wanderlust theme in a prominent, meaningful way.

Get your submissions ready if you haven’t already, and SUBMIT! Have a twitter thread I made with story examples. 

And finally, even more examples of books that encompass the theme, because why not:

  • Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin

  • Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie

  • The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo

  • Un Lun Dun, China Miéville