Soul Bone℠ Journal

Soul Bone℠ Journal holds space for the unsayable, the unknowable, the unimaginable. We welcome your duende and leaping mind, the wilderness of your creative imagination, your truthtelling, seeing and seeking, diversity, passion for social justice, care for climate and earth, love of and experimentation with language, obsession with craft, storytelling, musical ear, weirdness, mysticism, questions, longings, and secrets. We invite your vulnerability and trauma, your heartaches and griefs, your anger and frustration with the injustices in the world, but also your sensuality, your empathy and tenderness, your empowerment, and your wonder at all the heart-aching beauty that exists in the most unexpected places, in spite of everything.

What we want? We want to be surprised, shaken, and moved by your poetry, stories, essays, and hybrid pieces. We like work that is real, honest, authentic, and that comes from your subconscious depths. We love and celebrate joy but don’t leave out darkness or shadow. We welcome international, diverse, marginalized, and underrepresented voices. We welcome the pieces you are shy to share and that you most want to hide, that stir your soul, the things too impossible to say because they are too beautiful and tender or too painful and raw. We want to facilitate and promote the healing that needs to be done in this world on every possible level. We believe in spinning gold from straw through the transformational power of writing. We welcome conversations about humanity’s communal longing for peace, connection, bridging divides, and creating a more equal, just, and authentic world.

We’ll update here when we are ready to launch the Soul Bone℠ Journal. Sign up below for our newsletter if you want to find out about our submission guidelines, which we will post sometime in ‘24.

Ginger Persolus is a photographer and artist who received his undergraduate degree from MIU in Fairfield, Iowa. He took the photo above, which will be the first cover of Soul Bone Journal. He will design the cover for our first issue. The photo was part of a shrine assignment in a creative process course taught by Nynke Passi. It depicts a deer skull, a flower wreath, and two dead squirrels, an homage to life and death. The deer skull was buried underground until it was blanched clean. Thank you for this amazing image, Ginger!