16/10/2025
All things end, yet some rise to start anew.
Whether through the grace of stubbornness, the tilt of the quixotic, the catch of a buoyant second breath, or the deeply ingrained habit of never giving up, some stand in the face of finales and write another act of the play. I can’t go on, I’ll go on is as familiar to readers of Beckett as it is a succinct way of describing the human will to carry on against the odds.
Think of the jilted, the divorced, the widowed who give love another try. The dispossessed, the evicted, the expelled, the canned—re-emergent. The down-and-outer as up-and-comer. The clean addict, the cancer survivor, the paraplegic track and field champion. Think of the formerly incarcerated. The pest-plagued farmer who varies seasonal rotation—from corn to beans to spinach—to save the crops. Consider the exiled, exhausted knight of the road who finally finds a home in some Edenic wood.
All this being said, starting anew emphatically does not guarantee a rosy outcome. Many if not most ventures fall short or fully fail. Back at the drawing board the lights may go out, the pencil break, the chair collapse, the will give out. Often, our paths come to inevitable ends from which there is no starting from scratch, no rising from ashes no matter how hard we fight the good fight. Conjunctions:85, Anew will delve into the failure to relaunch as well as the reinvention of something thought forever lost. Just as the act of trying, trying again is the surest path to surviving—or failing with honor—Anew will center upon a theme that seems more pertinent than ever in a world of too many endings.
Conjunctions:85, Anew will feature previously unpublished writings by Rae Armantrout, Katherine Cart, Benjamin Percy, Clare Beams, Karen Russell, Julia Alvarez, Fred Moten, Jonathan Lethem, Shane McCrae, and Jonathan Carroll, among many others both influential and emerging.
Our Submittable window will remain open until midnight on October 31st. Please send your best innovative poetry, fiction, essays, hybrid or other writings, for us to consider for publication in either Conjunctions:85, Anew or Conjunctions online.
Learn more here ➡️ conjunctions.com/about/submit
