Guest Editors:

Trevino Brings Plenty

Gordon Henry

Jacqueline Keeler

Devon Mihesuah

What marks Native literature as distinctly Native? What terms, settings, objects, patterns of speech and language, rhythms of image, allusions to tribe, story, history, place and epistemological insights remind us that a work we read as Native-produced indicates and sustains a recognizable Native positionality in the delivery and reception of that work?

Must we breathe lard-burn of fictional fry bread, must we forego poetry patisseries, must a fictional character smudge, can CNF smudgings be drive-by smudgings, must we go to a fabulist pow wow, can we bring a Buddhist meditation cushion to a horror/thriller council meeting, must we kill histories of fur traders in open verse, can we not kill day trader tweets with rugged Indian prose, must we weep for the scorched electric earth on dirty white flash fiction beaches, can our tired, end of the trailer tropes communicate with mounds of rare earth imagist extractions, can we decolonize our shower heads in memoir, re-cologne(ize) our auto ethnography with a whiff of American Spirit, a waft of cedar, a peal of some holy bark, a smoking peel of rubber on a non rez road, while coughing our way through some university patchouli hallway, where a multi-tribal fraud invents our Native futures? No questions asked: how we do self-parody our positionality, humor ourselves once again, to reinvent the prison house of language, shatter the whitewashed editor images in the crooked mirror of Euro-American publication houses, bring to fore the colors and scenes of laughter lingering at occluded edges of settler colonial pagination. Bring hammer, nails, coffee, news threads, broken speeches, the gas and the vapors of urban street life affect, bring the old unwanted files, the notebooks you left in the closet with your grandmother's catholic school shoes, bring the writing no one invited to the feast, the relative character who never wanted to leave Europe after eating cheese with a French lover, drag in the sci-fi Choctaw fraud, take a hedge clippers to their American fairy tale braids, yank on the $500 (online retail) beaded medallion of the Metis fake who performed a ceremony before the deans approved the land acknowledgement, let the Czech beads scatter on the U museum floor. Bring the suburban apples and rez tomato chunks into story with the rhubarb scones and the chokecherry muffins, give the spy thriller protagonist a black ash attaché and birch bark luggage, deliver the indigenous language in fragments, in tobacco ring O's, like a baby talk wizard of Indigenous Ah's, with a little tea he here and a small dish of ish there. Make an autobiographical offering of dirty laundry to the eastern door of the washing machine, bring a Lakota math teacher to a high concept karaoke war, knock the worst and rap and rip in homage to tonal architecture of your comic book muse. Bring what you have to the cold prairie runway even if you never tried to fly with it, let it go out into the unsettling American dark with what you might want to say if you didn't want to laugh at yourself for wanting so badly to publish a bunch of stuff your grandmother would never read.

With that, co-editors Trevino Brings Plenty, Gordon Henry, Jacqueline Keeler and Devon Mihesuah are seeking submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, and scripts that imitate, satirize, parody, or critically allude to existing, terms, tropes, conventions, stylistic qualities of Settler American and/or American Indian and/or Indigenous writing. We also encourage textual innovation. For X (s)ample you might submit works that imitate social media posts, experiment with meme catalogues, explore satire through docu-poetics, derive from communique with phone apps and so on. Hopefully, Indigenous Brand X will operate as experiment in collaborative literature, whereby all the works submitted will be integrated in one longer, connected work, by the editors who will also contribute to the collection.

Deadline for Submissions:     October 3, 2022

Expected Publication Date:    November 2022

Submit work as a single email attachment to: editor@yellowmedicinereview.com

In your email/cover letter, please include the following:

• Your name and physical mailing address
• List of all titles and genres of included work
• Short bio
• Your tribal affiliation [YMR is a journal of Indigenous writing]
  

 Please adhere to the YMR submission format and guidelines:

• Send work as a Word or RTF attachment. If  there is unusual formatting in your piece, please also include a PDF.

• The subject line of your email should read as follows: YMR Fall 2022 Last Name (ex: YMR, Fall 2022 Wilson)

• Simultaneous submissions are acceptable.

• Please no previously published work.