Cheers from the Wasteland is a place-based journal featuring creative work by people with ties (loose, iron strong, and everything in-between!) to San Jose, California. Through words, images, and sounds, this journal aims to add contours to the wasteland, and surface the undeniable beauty—both underlying and blatant—that sets our city apart.
Call for Submissions - Theme Issue: Transportation
What does San Jose lose or gain from new modes of transportation? Who enters our neighborhoods via different forms of transportation, and who leaves? What does it mean to be perpetually in motion in the Bay? Cheers from the Wasteland aspires to see and share your personal experiences, your observations, and your documentation on this theme! We are looking for poems, personal essays, critical prose, hybrid or difficult-to-categorize forms of writing, and visual art.
Cheers from the Wasteland is interested in publishing work by writers of all ages, including those who have never been published before. People of color, women, queers, transfolks, youth, and disabled folks to the front!
SOME POSSIBLE TOPICS
BART’s expansion into the East Side / bike share / boundaries / Caltrain / car culture / collective senses of place / commuting / co-passengers / cruising / Diridon station / displacement / freeways / geography / gentrification / germs / Google busses and other tech shuttles / hitchhiking / isolation / light rail / lowriding / maps / mobility / parking tickets / place-based activism / routes / San Jose Brew Bike / security / ticket pricing / traffic jams / transit centers / the 24-hour 22 bus / the u-haul shortage / VTA / zones
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Cheers from the Wasteland is interested in publishing work by writers of all ages, including those who have never been published before. People of color, women, queers, transfolks, youth, and disabled folks to the front!
SOME POSSIBLE TOPICS
BART’s expansion into the East Side / bike share / boundaries / Caltrain / car culture / collective senses of place / commuting / co-passengers / cruising / Diridon station / displacement / freeways / geography / gentrification / germs / Google busses and other tech shuttles / hitchhiking / isolation / light rail / lowriding / maps / mobility / parking tickets / place-based activism / routes / San Jose Brew Bike / security / ticket pricing / traffic jams / transit centers / the 24-hour 22 bus / the u-haul shortage / VTA / zones
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
- Please email your submission, along with a short bio, to cheersfromthewasteland@gmail.com.
- Writers: you may submit up to five pages of written work, whether it is one long piece or multiple short pieces. While we are open to publishing self-published zine excerpts, we do not otherwise accept previously published work.
- Visual artists: please send us your work in high quality format, ready to upload on our website.
- Simultaneous Submissions: We do accept simultaneous submissions. If your work has been accepted by another publication, please email us and let us know.
- Compensation: We are happy to offer a small honorarium of $25 to all accepted writers and artists.
- Requesting Support: If you are a San Jose writer or artist who would like to submit to Cheers from the Wasteland but you require some form of editing or other encouragement, please reach out. We are a small team with limited resources, but we are here to help out however we can.
- Exceptions: If your work does not fit within these guidelines but you would still like us to consider it for publication, please reach out to us.
Masthead
LESLIE PATRON, Founding Editor
Leslie Patron lives and writes in her hometown of San Jose, California. Her most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Dream Pop Journal, Entropy, Queen Mob's Tea House, littletell, Daily Gramma, and The Operating System. She is currently at work on a collection of lyric essays about San Jose's history. She is the social media editor of 1913 Press and an active member of the South Bay DIY Zine Collective.
OCTOBER MONTOYA, Contributing Editor
October Montoya a mixed-race, queer and trans double Scorpio from Eastside San Jose, currently living in San Diego. Their writing has appeared in White Dads Zine: An Anthology of Creative Stories and Experiences told by PoC Fathered by white men and Cheers from the Wasteland. They debuted their poetry zine, Root Rot, last summer. They can be found on the internet at @octobermontoya.