Blue Short Stories
Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)
Guest editors : Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie
Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life.
Oceans and seas know no real boundaries. Reaching out in countless ways, oceans and seas connect with land, watersheds, rivers, underground water tables, and even with the sky, the moon, and the sun. Marine water fluctuates following atmospheric, gravitational, and temperature variation phenomena that rule the tides, the currents, the weather, and the cycles tying saltwater with fresh water, thus interweaving humans and other-than-human lifeforms in the great blue-green web of live. This special issue of the JSSE seeks to look specifically into short stories dealing with the complex, wonderful, but also awful ways in which marine matter and forms may be animate, agential, and entangled with our human activities, bodies, and discourses. Contributors are invited to tap into the blue currents of the earth that run all the way through our own veins, to consider how the permeability and fluidity, the pull and lability of bodies of water may trickle down into a blue poetics of the short story.
A specific focus on cross-species encounters and communication may help counter the alienation from our lives which marvelous marine beings and milieux suffer from—in part because they too often seem unfamiliar and strange, and in part because they are mostly inaccessible to us. Material approaches of humans as evolved from, made of, and dependent on salt water and beings could be confronted with mythical stories of sea worlds that have long shaped our perception, representations, and ways of life as land-dwelling and story-telling mammals. The study of short stories emanating from specific subcultures sharing myths, practices, and values revolving around the sea could potentially provide a grip on what might be called blue spiritualities. This may be of specific interest in the light of both the imaginative and the epiphanic dimensions of the short story genre, bringing us to ponder how the short story form may be of specific value when it comes to shifting paradigms and bringing about blue moments of truth. As a result, we will show great interest in papers demonstrating how certain short stories creatively challenge and reinvent our imaginaries and our narratives of becoming with the sea.
Papers might zoom in on the value of an ecopoiesis anchored in liminal places such as lagoons and coastal areas, which form ecotones and contact zones between water and land. Scholars may also potentially look at rivers and watersheds to reveal how those do flow into blue short stories, the poetics of which may be subtly tied to the sea indeed, thus already gesturing to a shift in paradigms, from “green” to “blue.” Finally, it could be of interest to look at stories anchored in places that are connected to the sea from a more diachronic perspective, i.e. places which used to be submerged in ancient times, which are thus possibly still marked by an ancient blue history, and thus encouraging a radically different perspective onto deserts, forests, plains, or any other place now perceived as antipodes to marine ecosystems.
It could be fruitful to explore the ways in which short stories accommodate the specificities of seascapes as underwater geographies, soundscapes, odorscapes, and feelscapes generating ways of perceiving, moving, and communicating that are properly outlandish and hence hard for humans to imagine. Participants could probe to what extent ecopoetic experiments with blue short stories are designed specifically to speak worlds about underwater ways of dwelling. Furthermore, scholars working in the field of indigenous studies and postcolonial literatures could help us understand the subtle ways in which Traditional Ecological Knowledges, storytelling, practices, and rituals may inform the writing of short stories. Finally, this special issue would greatly benefit from contributions shedding light on short stories that are permeated with scientific takes on wet matters and ocean life.
Paper proposals (400 to 500 words) should be sent to benedicte.meillon@univ-angers.fr and frederique.spill@gmail.com by December 15ht, 2024, together with a short bio-bibliography. Completed papers will be due by March 1st, 2025 and should be between 45,000 and 48,000 signs. The style sheet and guidelines for authors are available on the JSSE website: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/234.
Authors will get feedback on their full papers following a blind-peer review process run by the JSSE team by the end of May 2025. Authors will then have 4 weeks to complete potential revisions and send the final versions of their papers back to the guest editors before June 30.
Recommended Bibliography
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