About Transcendence

 

Transcendence (trænˈsɛndəns)

Noun

1. The quality of exceeding

2. Superiority

3. The act of being outside consciousness and understanding

 

Transcendence is a literary and art journal that strives to tell stories. Real or surreal, vivid or vague, we want you and your work. Tell us about the time you buried your beloved in a rose garden, or when your original character broke out of prison. We want your narrative to grab us by our hands and pull us forward. Paint us a picture, then crush all of our dreams. Break every single boundary. Lead us to the end, and make us love it.

 

The work in Transcendence may contain language, sexual content that is not visually explicit, violence, and mature themes. Reader discretion is advised. 

 

 

What we like

 

Our baseline is this: we want work that tells stories. But that's not quite enough. A lot of works tell stories, so what's specific about the stories we want to tell? First of all, we like poems that are narrative or narrative-ish. Think more like "Mending Wall" than "Song of Myself". We'll still take a look at your experimental poems and sonnets about your pet betta fish, but we prefer work that's got a clear purpose. On that note, we also generally prefer free verse to form and long poems to short ones, but we always manage to find exceptions. Some other stuff we like: very interesting, very flawed people; original metaphors, wordplay, and vivid images.

 

For prose, we mostly want short stories. Experimental prose is cool, but most of the time it's not for us...unless it's a story. Pull that off, and we'll be pretty excited. As far as what's in the story, we like twisty plots. Make things get bad, and worse, and worser until people snap and start killing each other. Or just give us an unexpected ending. We want characters that aren't who they seem, and settings that are more than just place, that are composed of people and spirit. We want a new twist on an old trick, or a whole new trick altogether.

 

With art, we value concept over composition. Artistic tricks are nice, but we want them combined with an image that makes us think, "What happened here?" Show us the who, what, and why first, and the how later.

 

It would take an entire book to list everything that we love or don't love, so this is nowhere close to a complete description. Just because your work doesn't exhibit one or more of the things above, it doesn't mean we won't consider it -- there are things we left off this list, and pet peeves we forgot to mention. If your work falls into one or some of these, you're on a good track. Surprise us, and stun us. Most of all, connect with us.