Submissions update
For anyone who's still waiting to hear from us about a story they submitted during our January submission window, we now expect to respond to everyone before the end of April.
We've already selected 2 stories, and will be choosing 8 more from the 41 we currently have on hold.
We do hope to have a shorter response time with future submission periods, but our cross-town move at the beginning of March really slowed us down. Hopefully we won't have to move again anytime soon!
Support Mysterion on Patreon!
We've already selected 2 stories, and will be choosing 8 more from the 41 we currently have on hold.
We do hope to have a shorter response time with future submission periods, but our cross-town move at the beginning of March really slowed us down. Hopefully we won't have to move again anytime soon!
Support Mysterion on Patreon!
I have a question that's been on my mind since I first read about your magazine. I don't respond emotionally to religion, but I find in the stories and concepts lots of fascinating material that i enjoy writing about. When I contemplate sending in a story, I keep running into your statement that you're looking for stories that "engage with Christianity". We often talk of enemy armies engaging with each other which is obviously not what you mean. We speak also of young couples who are engaged and thus coming together in anticipation of spending their lives together married. Then the word also has the meaning of having one's attention, mind or energy occupied as in "deeply engaged in conversation". This seems to be the closest sense to what I think you mean. I like this sense of the word, but I'm still a bit unclear what "stories engaging with Christianity" means to you. I tend to approaching writing on Christian stories and ideas via alternate history--sometimes so drastically alternate that it can feel like a variation of a theme in which the theme itself is almost lost. For some reason, I find myself strongly interested in your magazine, but I have no idea if the kinds of things I write about and my approach to writing them "engage with Christianity" in any way you find meaningful. I'd appreciate any guidance you have to offer on what the phrase means to you.
ReplyDeleteYou're right about "deeply engaged in conversation" being the closest to what we mean. I think Stephen Case's review of the Mysterion anthology on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31304813-mysterion) also does a good job of explaining this. It's hard to say whether the approach that you're describing would result in stories that are what we're looking for without reading the stories, though, as there are so many variables. We are interested in non-religious perspectives on Christianity, but if the Christian themes and ideas are just part of the scenery, it's less likely to be what we're looking for. Especially if they're common tropes that we see all the time (e.g., deals with the devil, Heaven and Hell as vast bureaucracies locked in eternal opposition, angels, etc.). Alternative history could be really interesting, if it's a scenario we don't see that often. I don't know if this helps at all...
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