Recurring Themes: Perspectives on Submissions

As we come up to the autumn equinox and the release of our sixth issue, I’ve been thinking about some of the recurring themes we’ve encountered in the hundreds of stories we receive every submission period. Because we want the weird, we see recurring cultural conceits like cryptids and other folkloric characters as well as stories featuring elements outside typical realist lit fic like body horror, surrealism, and absurdity. Recurring themes aren’t disqualifiers in our editorial book, but the more common a trope or plot element is, the more pressure there is from a critical standpoint to be tight, polished, and to have a fresh take. As magazine editors, we get a great perspective from the volume of submitted work we receive, and it allows us to be able to think a little harder about where these ideas might be rooted. 

Body Parts Falling Out or Off

We get a number of stories every submission window that delve into scenes where one or more body parts or organs fall off (or otherwise escapes from the body). Some of these pieces are likely commentaries on the fragility of the human experience—our discomfort with aging, fear of uncontrollable physical changes, etc. But beyond this, I see a philosophical struggle to comprehend the self as a contained being. The idea that our body acts involuntarily can be disturbing, and many of these stories show that concern by giving agency to organs that eject or morph into other things. There’s an obvious anxiety out there about our lack of dominion over the body as self—as “our own.” 

Poop or Other Gross Stuff

Poop hasn’t made its way into most literature quite yet, and it and other bodily functions also aren’t usually included in stories in the more realist sphere. These themes are considered unnecessary, unprofessional, or unhelpful to the plot by many editors and writers. All of these could be true, but what if the story is about something gross? That’s cause for discomfort, nose-wrinkling, maybe confusion. There’s misdirection perhaps, and humor, or absurdity. These button-pushing areas of real human experience, the “less polite” ones, say a lot about our desire to resist the rules of art with a capital A and share more of the lived-in worlds we all have. 

Revenge

It comes in many forms and gets knitted within a lot of different plots. Revenge is a common topic, and one that feels very contemporary and very American: a display of righting a personally perceived wrongdoing, often to a violent extreme. The obsession is understandable, as we have so many mainstream and cult films, pop songs, and cartoons with plots that are entirely built on revenge. It’s sort of everywhere, and perhaps we see more of this in the US as part of the debt of presenting extreme individualism as an ideal in a setting with ever-widening inequities and a growing sense of powerlessness from those outside a small margin of the population. To be clear, revenge in a plot can be extremely satisfying, and can speak to contemporary thinking and current events. But the pursuit of revenge is most effective when only part of a bigger journey. 

As an editor and a thinker, I like being able to zoom out a bit and make conjectures about the current state of creative humanity—at least, the portion that send their work to us at Weird Lit. It’s not a perspective everyone gets to have. We want to read the stories that many journals would pass over in our pursuit of work that pushes, breaks, or blatantly ignores boundaries. We want the type of writing that channels social anxieties, human philosophical concerns, and big-picture questions. We want new, flipped, or weird perspectives! Those make for impactful stories, even with common themes. Take a look from a new angle, or in a new light. There may be nothing new under the sun, but anything can look new under the glow of the moon.