27th July 2012

Submissions are invited for The Fire Crane – a new, newspaper-style publication designed to showcase the best contemporary Cumbrian writing twice a year, to be published by New Writing Cumbria.

Issue #1 is planned to coincide with the beginning of C-Art, the open studios trail that is Cumbria’s biggest visual arts event, on 1 September.

Each issue will have a theme – in this case, ‘Literature and the Visual Arts’, which might be interpreted as follows:

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• writing (poetry or fiction) inspired by and written in response to a work of art or craft, or a photograph;
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• writing about the visual arts – for example an essay (long, tall, short) about a particular artist or a particular work, or about some aspect of visual arts practice. (The latter could include an artist writing about his/her own work.)
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• collaborations between writers and artists which combine text and image in some way;
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• other ways of approaching the theme not listed above. The list is offered in the spirit of suggestion, not prescription. Surprise us.
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Whilst it’s not compulsory for writers to draw exclusively on the work of Cumbria-based artists who are participating in C-Art – any art from anywhere in any period is fair game – we’d very much welcome writing that does. There are well over 100 individual artists in the C-Art Directory and you can see samples of their work here>>
http://c-art.org.uk/directory/

And – whilst we expect the visual arts theme to inform most of the content of the publication, we hope there will be space for other writing too.

The Fire Crane will be a free publication, widely distributed to libraries, arts venues and – especially – made available at literature events in Cumbria and beyond. We’ll also be targeting a number of literary magazine editors and publishers – the whole point of the exercise is to raise the profile of Cumbrian writing not only with readers but within the wider literary community.

The deadline for submissions is Sunday 5 August, by email as a Word document (either doc or docx is fine) or txt or rtf attachment to: [email protected] You should, of course, be a resident or native of Cumbria.

If you are supplying images to accompany your text, please remember that they will need to be high resolution – 300 dpi (dots/pixels per square inch) – to be of sufficient quality for printing.

If you have any queries or wish to discuss your submission, email Mick North at the address above or call 01228 670076.