Lake as Legacy/Lake as Future: Great Salt Lake Anthology 2024

"Forsaken [South Shore—Great Salt Lake]" by Chris Miller

The SLCC Community Writing Center is part of the Great Salt Lake Collaborative (GSLC), a Solutions Journalism collaborative of well more than a dozen Utah organizations working together to share stories about Great Salt Lake and ways to protect our city’s dying namesake. For 2024, we are proud to announce a call for submissions for the "Lake as Legacy/Lake as Future" Community Anthology 2024.

We're especially interested in speculative fiction--written, visual, multimedia, performance--that responds to the themes of "lake as legacy" and/or "lake as future."

What is speculative fiction? There are debates about what this super genre encompasses. For the purposes of the 2024 Great Salt Lake Community Anthology, "speculative fiction" is an umbrella genre in which writers/creators speculate on big the "what if?" question about the past, present, and future. Speculative fiction includes science fiction, climate fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, utopian, and other forms of storytelling centered on that "what if?" question in ways that blend and blur reality with the not-yet-possible or with the entirely fantastical.

We will consider submissions outside of speculative fiction as long as they directly and meaningfully respond to the "lake as legacy" and "lake as future" themes.

Text-based submissions over 3,000 words that are accepted will be excerpted for the print edition. The entirety of the work will be published online.

This call is open to any writer, photographer, performing artist, and visual artist ages 15 and older.

NOTE: editors and designers will make small edits for clarity and design consistency.

Submission must be submitted via Submittable no later than 11:59 p.m. on May 31, 2024.

A "Lake as Legacy/Lake as Future" Reading Gala will be held in the late summer/early fall. Contributors to the anthology will be given a print edition of the anthology and an opportunity to read from their work at the gala. More details will be shared in June.

Submit to Lake as Legacy/Lake as Future

"Reflections on the Lake II" by Gabriela de Oliveira