One summer I collected cicada exoskeletons in an empty coffee can, then went around the neighborhood attaching them to people’s screen doors in pleasing geometric patterns.

I do hope readers are left with just a bit more audacity to lean into the weird in their own lives.

We all lose control, at some point or another, of the shape and momentum of our lives.

I think it’s in our nature as people, or maybe as writers, to be self-critical. You have to be able to be self-critical to get better, but I think you also have to be a bit delusional.

My closet is intentionally organized according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and all the objects contained within it are ruled by entropy. Nonetheless, an uninformed observer viewing my closet may overlook the science and call me a slob.

Many believe that weeds exist because of the cracks in the pavement, when in reality we are the ones who cause them. Here's how you slowly crack the system: take care of your roots, train your resilience, grow inconspicuously, be with many.

While basking in Igorrr's melodic screaming, I thought about music as a method of storytelling and realized there are parallels between what I love the most about this band and what we enjoy finding in our submissions at Weird Lit.

God had no focus groups and created scorpions. 

We want the type of writing that channels social anxieties, human philosophical concerns, and big-picture questions.

I go walking and muttering to myself through the trees.

Like a beaver building a dam, I return to the page. It’s just part of my nature.

It’s a beautiful thing to create something new, and the process is sometimes as important, if not more important, than the final product.

Reality is whatever it is, it doesn’t care to satisfy us or to even be intelligible, it doesn’t owe us anything.

We’ve got a few suggestions for how to harness your weird friends or family as beta readers to help you kick off your revision process.

I sometimes google people by chance on the day they die.

Avant-garde is less importantly a title we give to ideas, art, or movements, and more an opening in the way we should be looking at these things ourselves, without the anchors of our current societal hangups and our constant need for cultural relativity.

If you drive by my swamp at night, I will slow your car down, and it will keep slowing until it stops unless you think pure thoughts and speak these thoughts allowed, like a prayer to me.

I’ve recently been delighted to peek into the mind of the visionary who has informed much of my appreciation for surrealism and experimental art.

I'd like to apologize to the supernatural if I've encountered it and either not noticed or been rude. 

Tim Conley's piece "Popular Demand" caught our attention immediately with its comically unreliable narrator but poignant commentary on human empathy. Learn a little more about the author in the interview below.

I hope the work makes viewers want to look closely, to enjoy the detail, the color, and the human origin evident in the technique.

I want to do more in service of cultivating the wonderful art that is actively being suppressed and removed from the world. Weird communities are disappearing, hell, communities are disappearing. Let’s fight back. 

Done well, nonsense literature like this thrills my brain. Experimental stuff, rewarding puzzles, and especially humor are all genres I crave. The catch is they have to actually tell a story and make me feel something.

Mistakes are your friend, the portal to discovery, genius makes none of them, etc.