From now through Oct. 13, Peach Velvet Mag (PV Mag) is accepting poetry, prose and art submissions for their second annual Hallozine: The Poet’s Tarot.
Place your card in the poet’s deck by submitting your personal tarot card creations to be a part of PV Mag’s Halloween-themed zine. Title your tarot card and describe its meaning using poetry, prose, art and anything in-between.
Submissions must be 750 words or less. Writing and art applicable to this zine’s theme of tarot cards, Halloween or a tribute to general spookiness can be emailed to PeachVelvetMagazine@gmail.com. Please include TAROT and your name in the subject line.
Peach Velvet Mag is a new adult zine press that publishes as often as it can manage—in print and online. They love emerging, diverse voices and perspectives as well as strange, experimental work that pushes the boundaries of form and genre. PV Mag looks for work that has unflinching honesty, as well as a deep reverence for the intersection of language and the human condition.
PV Mag’s zines are not anthologies or collections of works, as opposed to other literary magazines. The zines they produce are a spliced patchwork of thoughts and notions that come together to form a narrative. Each zine is a new story, and to make that happen, submissions are chosen based on how they work together and what they add to the overall narrative.
There are a couple factors that are considered when looking at each work that ends up in the PeachVelvetMagazine@gmail.com inbox to determine if PV Mag is the right home for that piece. Their submissions page describes this criteria as: “Purpose: We want to walk away with something. Poignancy: We want work that evokes thought or emotion, and resonates. Relevancy: We want work that speaks to the theme and our new adult audience.”
Recently, PV Mag’s summer ‘18 zine, Seconds to Consume, was released in late August. Seconds to Consume’s theme was built around the concept of fleetingness and brevity as well as the way time, energy and the things we cherish are consumed by both ourselves and our environments. Things like words, black holes, cotton candy, a moment, the air, voice, trust and life were all referenced in the prompt for this theme, which inspired its contributors in a number of interesting ways.
The final product of Seconds to Consume featured a variety of micro-works that illustrated as much with the white space of the page as they did with their words. The topics ranged from conversation to sexuality to occupations and food—ultimately coming to a head on the concept of mortality. It examined the irony of life and how it is so easily and quickly extinguished, ending aptly on the short-but-bittersweet piece by Braxton Kocher: “She blinks / It’s all over now.”
The editorial staff of Peach Velvet Mag are super excited for The Poet’s Tarot and all the delightfully eerie and unnerving submissions they hope to receive. The spookier, the better—and contributors that include artwork of any kind to accompany their writing are all the better still!
Submit poetry, prose, art and anything in-between that is 750 words or less and applicable to The Poet’s Tarot to PeachVelvetMagazine@gmail.com to be considered for 2018’s Hallozine. To reiterate, please include TAROT and your name in the subject line of your submission. Visit www.veronicamattaboni.wixsite.com/peachvelvet for more information.
Veronica Mattaboni is a graduate student with a degree in English. ✉ VM785925@wcupa.edu.