“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
-James Baldwin
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
- Toni Morrison
“Sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.”
- Carmen Maria Machado
The editors of West Trade Review seek essays that explore the idea of inheritances, or what you were given without asking for it.
Everyone shows up already holding something: a surname, a debt, a language or accent, a diagnosis, a border crossed by someone else on your behalf, or perhaps a god you were handed at four and have been negotiating with ever since.
What do you do with what you didn't choose, or what arrives uninvited? Keep it, refuse it, spend it, mistranslate it, hand it on deliberately altered, or fail to hand it on at all? The failures are as interesting as the reckonings.
We are not looking for family memoir, nor for essays on the mechanism of transmission. In other words, don't show us how it got to you. Show us how you carried it and how you dealt with what you didn't choose.
We're open to essays that are documentary in impulse, essays that go to the archive, the county record, the medical file, the photograph, the language itself. We're also open to essays whose form is part of the argument (fragment, braid, criticism, catalogue). If the shape is doing something the paragraph can't, we want to see it.
NOTE: Submissions which do not meet the following guidelines will not be considered:
- All submissions must be previously unpublished and are limited to one entry per submission period.
- Submissions should be between approximately 2500 and 5000 words.
- Work must be submitted as a Microsoft Word file and include a clear title of the work
- Submissions must be accompanied by a cover letter and a third-person biography of no more than 150 words. Work submitted without a biography will not be considered.
-In your cover letter, please mention your social media handles (Instagram, Bluesky, etc.). If you have a website dedicated to your writing, please include the link in your cover letter as well.
Entries should be submitted to the appropriate Submittable project at the following link:
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
ROOTS & WORDS: INHERITANCES
Submissions Open Year-Round
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