Almanac Submissions
The submission period is now open for the New Farmers Almanac Vol. 7: Premonition. Please email [email protected] with your abstracts, ASAP if possible and no later than January 6, 2024.
What comes next?
As a literary journal powered by farmers, for farmers, with farmers—in daily relation with the living world. Vol. 7 is called PREMONITION. Literature, as in dreamworld allows our human psyches to sort, unfold and reorganize memories and meaning. Evolutionary life, learning from extremity, unfolds with inspiration, trembles towards survival. We are earth-bound beings tuned to a world wide web of soil, it is a response to narratives of inevitability and selfishness taught by these machines. This Almanac challenges us to share our premonitions: what transmissions we are receiving from the living world?
Percussive as a porcelain toilet, sucking down, the brain-drain of screens and convenience. Standing in line to be scanned—since the pandemic has ended many of our farm store customers went back to the super-market. BEEP BEEP goes the absence of the sacred.
Drop-down vending machine, consumer-packaged goods, an ordered world. Are we slipping backwards? In the chaos of an unfurling world, does computational power fulfill our wish for calm, wisdom, and guidance? Will we yield our power of discernment to mechanisms we cannot understand? The computers do not know, and cannot teach us how to survive on earth.
Shimmering in a simulation of all-knowingness, these learning machines and artificial intelligences are entrained to an economy of transactional addition. Algorithms of cheapness and expedience: repeating staccato habits of control. These are domesticated and domesticating patterns of thought.
Longer standing is our human history of standing on the earth, of working in the earth, of observing, relating, adapting ourselves in a world of ever-learning aliveness. We humans have ordered our ethno-botany, our culture, our horticulture, our agriculture, and our civics through the making of meaning in relationship with terrestrial spaces. A world alive with emblems, forebearers, teachers—long before empires and plantations and predictive algorythms—we reacted to landscape signals, moved on our feet across continents. We are ancient humans who dream, who sense, whose ears are tuned to the whispers and transmissions of evolutionary life. We have followed stars and kelp highways across the vast Pacific. We held songlines the length and breadth of tropics and deserts. We have followed impulses, our versions of sacred, shamanic inspiration. We call these habits taste and tradition.
We call on you to type out, your observations, your source material: your anticipations. We ask that you sniff the wind and tell us what you are smelling.
Send your editorial abstracts to [email protected], ASAP, and no later than midnight on January 5, 2024.