CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

MAKE•SHIFT ZINE

For me this has felt like a long time coming — below I am finally sharing details for submissions to the sister project of Motherlore, and this time the call-out includes artwork too!

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THEME

MAKE•SHIFT

to do the best one can with whatever means are at hand / an interim and temporary measure

This zine focuses on creativity alongside carework, in the form of making but also shifting – not just identities, but also ideas and boundaries.

What does creativity look like when you’re a parent or carer? Perhaps it’s pictures you take as your baby sleeps, audios you record on your phone, attempts to return to the same idea over and over after interruption, lists in your notes app or on scraps of paper, disjointed fragments that flit between genre...

This zine will cover the friction involved in creativity and carework; subversion of previously used forms or practices; rejection of moulds that don’t serve the rituals of carework; and telling stories in the organic, accessible ways available to us in the midst of caregiving.

It will embody the unpalatable, the unfinished, the “messy”. It will showcase the amazing work that we are creating with the little time we have, without a focus on finalising or perfecting work before sharing it.

What does it look like when you are constantly interrupted, when you can’t prioritise your work, when you don’t go back to a piece to iron out the edges? What if you incorporate this — the stop-start nature of creating around care — into the piece? What if you let it arrive in an imperfect state — what would it look like then?

IDEAS

Margins, edgework, multiplicity, mother-logues, patchwork, diaristic, mosaic, porous, flux, remix, spill…

THINK

• Bite-size over huge projects (though feel free to submit excerpts/parts of a bigger project)

• Unusual form over the more predictable; OR strange content if the form is more predictable – i.e., subvert in some way to reflect the theme

• Form and/or content that reflects the disjointed/interrupted/partitioned/under-prioritised time spent on it

• Use of form as well as content to reflect on the experience of mothering/carework

• Ideas of rupture, shapeshifting, separation, identity, creativity; the death of something leading to the creation of something else

• All the scraps and edges you have that you’re waiting for more time to “finish”

DEADLINE

18th April 2026

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please refer to separate guidelines for writing, artwork, and audio/visual work below.

General Guidelines

i. Please include a brief author bio (roughly 1–4 sentences) with separate website/social links with your submission.

ii. The themes for each issue act as a guide and are open to interpretation.

iii. Copyright remains yours. If you send me something that has been published before please inform me about where and when so that I can take this into consideration.

iv. Your connection to motherhood or caregiving is personal. This is a gathering of various records and voices of motherhood and mothering; of caring and being cared for; of mourning and loss; of trying to conceive; of infertility; of the mothering of siblings, of parents, of oneself; of foster care or fostering, adoption or surrogacy, abortion or miscarriage; of one’s own mothers or grandmothers; of all those caring, nurturing, and growing life on this earth, alongside mother nature.

Art (photography, scans/photos of any physical work, digital art, etc.)

Please submit up to two high-quality images (.jpg / .png) if submitting with text or four high-quality images without text (if your work includes text, please also refer to writing guidelines below) to: motherloremagazine@gmail.com. If submitting more than one image, please let me know if you are happy for the artwork to be considered separately or if you wish for them to be published as a whole. Please include titles if you would like them to be included alongside the artwork.

Audio/Video

Feel free to submit short audio/video to: motherloremagazine@gmail.com if this is the format that lends itself to your mothering/parenting and creative work, however, please note, these will feature in a Substack zine-post rather than in the physical zine. Please include titles if you would like them to be included alongside the work.

Writing

Email one file, in .doc or .docx format, containing up to five pieces in any form (noting the line and word-limits for each piece below) with clear titles and/or page breaks to: motherloremagazine@gmail.com.

Limit for each piece: up to 40 lines of poetry / lists / sparse writing (i.e., not prose)

Limit for each piece: up to 300 words prose / one A4 page’s worth* (if its form looks more like poetry than prose then please refer to the poetry limit instead)

If you have any questions please comment below, and do check comments and answers for further clarification before submitting.

Following the deadline, I will look through pieces after they have been longlisted by a panel of creatives.

*depending on the piece, we may accept up to double the above limits (up to 80 lines of poetry / up to 600 words of prose) but will tend to favour shorter pieces due to the fragmented theme of the zine.

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Terms of Publication

Thank you for your interest in submitting.

Unlike Motherlore, this zine will be physical only, and a digital pdf will not be available. Rather than receiving a free digital copy, contributors will receive a complimentary paid Substack subscription for three months and have access to the paywalled audio/video submissions.

You do not have to be a mother to submit, but your piece does need to be connected to mothering/motherhood/caregiving/mother nature. There is no fee for submitting. Please note, these are low-budget projects that I curate and spend many hours on, to share mothers’ and carers’ stories and to encourage mothers and carers to write. I keep costs as low as possible so that the issues are accessible. I would need to drastically raise prices and make it less accessible if I were to provide complimentary print copies to contributors. Thank you for your understanding.

I look forward to your submission!