Category: Posts

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health welcomes words and images attentive to life, in its fullness and its fragility. For it is mainly in moments of heightened awareness of our vulnerability, and of the vulnerability of the world we inhabit, that life invites us to slow down, listen, look, feel, and try to find shareable words, images, and gestures. This happens both in the exhilaration of fellowship and in the experience of loss, illness, and grief. We know how difficult it is to articulate pain, grief or love. We know that there are experiences that challenge representation, be it verbal or non-verbal. Yet it is precisely because of how disruptive such experiences are that we are compelled to find ways to intimate the inchoate, to articulate the inarticulate, so as to make this knowable and shareable. For, as Clarice Lispector noted (2010), often it is by writing that we become aware of things that we didn’t even know we knew.

Within the context of the Project in Medical Humanities, based at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, we have applied the methodology proposed by Narrative Medicine (Charon 2008 & Charon et al. 2016) in teaching, as well as in reading and writing groups for patients, students, and healthcare providers. In this praxis, we explore the potential of close reading and reflective writing to learn more about ourselves and others. Antenna welcomes these and other reflective expressions, for, as Arthur W. Frank (2022) reminds us, “to know my own story, I need to encounter stories that are not mine.” Likewise, it is through our own experience that we engage with the stories of others. If academic writing frames ongoing analytical thinking and scientific knowledge, creative expression enables us to explore other forms of integrating experiential and reflective knowledge. By re-connecting biology, biography, and culture, by inscribing the subjective in the communal, literary and artistic expression invites us to consider the multifaceted experience of health and illness, in the fullness and vulnerability of being alive. Antenna aims to air such expressions so that they may be audible and find resonance both among those receiving and providing healthcare, as well as in academic reflection, political decision-making, and civic engagement.

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health accepts texts, images, and videos in the following categories: poetry; fiction; literary non-fiction; graphic narrative; visual arts; video; reviews. The working languages are English and Portuguese

Submission Guidelines
Poetry: up to 3 poems
Fiction and literary non-fiction: 2000-3000 words
Flash fiction: up to 1000 words
Graphic narrative: up to 3 pages (high resolution)
Visual arts: up to 3 images (high resolution, at least 2000 pix)
Video (cinema, documentary, dance, music, theatre): up to 5 minutes
Reviews (of publications, films, documentaries, performances, exhibitions): up to 1000 words

Contact: antenna@letras.ulisboa.pt
Publication: annual

CFP Antenna 1/2025:
– Submissions: 30 June 2025
– Publication: Autumn 2025

Small Pleasures podcast: In the latest episode, Livi Michael and Sonya Moor look at two marvels of short fiction – Sarah Hall’s ‘Mrs Fox’ and Jackie Kay’s ‘My Daughter the Fox’. Hall and Kay use elements of realism to ask outrageous questions: What happens when a man’s wife becomes a fox? Or when a woman gives birth to a fox cub? By setting the wild figure of a fox in domestic spaces, Hall and Kay raise unsettling questions about what it means to be a mother, for a man to love his wife – and our fraught relationship with the natural world.

What can short stories expect from readers?
I expect you to remember that I am not a novel. If I say, ‘the queen died, then the king died of grief’, don’t ask what happened before or after. I shine a light on the particular, an event, a character, a time. The rest remains in the dark. I experiment with words and use them sparingly. Less is more. The last request: let me be a chameleon and turn into colours as yet unseen.

How do short stories relate, if at all, to borderless fiction?
I studied Comparative Literature because I believe that the best literature surpasses national divisions and political borders. Literature is too important to be restricted by what are often arbitrary partitions. Short stories can be universal because they are focused and can exist outside period and location. That makes it easier than any other form for the short story to move between languages and cultures. Write short story, can translate, will travel.

Which short story last made you jealous and why?
I am jealous of the writers who succeed in what I am trying to do, which is to have a recognisable style while making each text formally different. Lydia Davis always impresses, as does Gabriel Josipovici. His collection Heart’s Wings (2010) offers a range of forms, each story a world of its own. If you force me to name just one, then it is ‘Mobius the Stripper’. It is profound, funny and clever.

Vesna Main has published several novels – each stylistically different – and a collection of short stories, Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt, 2017). Two of her stories have been selected for Best British Short Stories (Salt 2017, 2019).
Her latest novel, Waiting for A Party (Salt 2024) is a narrative told by a ninety-two-year-old woman longing for affection and sexual intimacy.

[References: ‘Mobius the Stripper’ is collected in Josipovici, Gabriel, Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974) and Heart’s Wings and Other Stories (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010).]

This original new study explores the recent flowering of short fiction in Ireland. More specifically, it discusses the cultural, material, and ideological usages of the short form in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, engaging with the forces that have helped to shape the production, dissemination, and reception of short stories over the last few decades in Ireland. The book is generically fluid and reads short fiction in its many guises, from short-shorts to long stories, and from standalone texts included in periodicals and online forums, to stories that were published in volumes, miscellanies, and edited collections.

The book focuses especially upon anthologies and the act of anthologisation. The creation of an anthology is never a simple value-free act, since those associated with the curation of anthologies are always obliged to make decisions that are variously material, economic, formal, ideological, and aesthetic. Some of these decisions are founded upon personal preferences, others are grounded in subjective prejudices and biases; however, all have consequences for the ways that a literary culture is created, marketed, taught, and read. This new book explores this subject, and looks at the consequences for ways that we think about Irish short fiction in the contemporary moment.

Call for Papers

EVENT: 6th Annual GOTH Symposium
CFP DEADLINE: 12 January 2026
EVENT DATE: Friday 15 May 2026

ORGANIZERS: The Open University Centre for Research into Gender and Otherness in the Humanities
GUEST PANEL: The Open University Medieval and Early Modern Research Group
TYPE: F2F
HOST: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts & Humanities
LOCATION: The Open University, Milton Keynes, Library Seminar Rooms 3&5.
THEME: Gender and otherness in drama, literature and visual culture, IV.

The Annual GOTH Symposium welcomes scholars from within and outside The Open University for productive interdisciplinary discussion and debate. The Program Committee invites proposals for presentations focusing on any aspects of gender and/or otherness in creative writing or pre-modern drama, literature and visual culture, in two formats:

1. Postgraduate students only: 5-minute lightning papers on any aspects of human gender and otherness in creative writing or drama, literature and/or visual culture.

2. Open call: 15-minute papers focusing on any aspects of gender and otherness in creative writing or drama, literature and/or visual culture, with particular emphasis on:

Panel 1: Gender, race, disability and/or human physical otherness in religious and secular medieval and early modern theatre, with topics including but not limited to:
performed otherness
otherness in secular dramatic texts
otherness in religious drama (eg convent drama, liturgical drama within the church, performances of Biblical episodes or Saint’s lives in religious and/or secular spaces).
understanding performed otherness through the study of performativity, gesture, costume, crossdressing and/or textiles.

Panel 2: Gender, race, disability and/or otherness in creative writing (Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, script), with topics including but not limited to:
Dark tourism and memorialisation
Ekphrasis
The portrayal and representation of “other” in creative writing
The role of the outsider in contemporary writing
The role of the body political in contemporary writing
The Gothic genre in contemporary writing

Panel 3: Female patrons and the fashioning of gender in medieval and early modern literary, dramatic and visual arts, with topics including but not limited to:
the role of gender in cultural creation, performance and patronage
cultural patronage as a pathway to female legal power and status.
Ways of using gender, costume, cross-dressing and textiles to study and reframe dramatic narrative (eg women as ‘story-weavers’ /embroiderers of vestments/costumes).

Panel 4: The Open University Medieval and Early Modern Research Group guest panel:
Radical Otherness? Utopia and other ideal societies in the medieval and early modern world, with topics including but not limited to:
Self and other in visual, literary and musical utopias
Gender, race, age and disability
Self and other in monastic and other ideal communities

Please submit your proposal (200 words max) and academic bio (100 words max) on or before the CFP deadline of 12 December 2025, to m.a.katritzky@open.ac.uk & FASS-GOTH-Admin@open.ac.uk. All presenters who stay for the whole symposium will be provided with 1 night of paid accommodation (14-15 May) and all refreshments on the day.

Further information on the event and registration is being posted on the GOTH website as it becomes available: http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/centres/goth.

Inquiries on any aspect of the symposium may be emailed to FASS-GOTH-Admin@open.ac.uk.

Circulated on behalf of Team GOTH
Consultant: Dr Chloe Fairbanks

Committee:
M A Katritzky – Director, GOTH & Professor of Theatre Studies, OU, ECW
Dr Andrew Murray, GOTH EDI Co-ordinator, Lecturer in Art History, OU
Mrs Jennie Owen, GOTH Health & Safety Co-ordinator, Lecturer in Creative Writing, OU, ECW.
Isabelle Lepore, GOTH PG Forum Convenor (OU, ECW)

Please check GOTH website for latest details: http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/centres/goth