*CFP* "THE FREEDOM TO MAKE AND REMAKE", ISSUE II, VOL. II, NORTH MERIDIAN REVIEW

Each year The North Meridian Review will also publish a special, guest-edited issue of the journal. For our inaugural year, the theme is “The Freedom to Make and Remake” and will be guest-edited by Mark Latta the director of the Flanner Community Writing Center and Instructor of English at Marian University.

Within the opening lines of his 2008 essay, “The Right to the City,” David Harvey writes, “The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” Viewed from the current American political climate, the freedom to make and remake ourselves and the places with which we identify may feel more urgent now than at any time since the Civil Rights Era. Viewed another way, however, this freedom of revision and rewrite has continued without interruption, especially for those who maintain lives on the edges of consumer society. However, from the perspective of those whose lives have been intertwined with the cultural, economic, or personal dispossession of colonialism and white supremacy, Harvey’s “freedom to make and remake” was and is a well-maintained fiction.  The freedom to re/make is not a freedom without consequence, risk, or reward.  To better understand these outcomes and tensions, we seek essays, articles, and poetry of those who work to shape, make, and remake their cities through community development, activism, public art (sanctioned or otherwise), education (formal or informal), publishing, and performance. Special consideration will be given to community based writing and non-traditional methods of constructing knowledge.

Broader questions the issue will cover:

• Who is freely able to exercise the right to make, remake, and revise? 
• Who is prevented from exercising this right?  Who maintains and enforces this prevention? 
• Whose stories are being told?  Whose stories remain missing? Whose stories have been erased? 
• In what ways are these stories being told and what is revealed by the ways they are told or silenced? 
• How are places shaped by stories and stories shaped by places? 
• How are the normative forces of whiteness and neoliberalism maintained, disrupted, or altered by exercising the freedom to re/make our cities and ourselves?

Scholarly works should be 5,000-10,000 words in length and adhere to University of Chicago Style (17th ed.).  Personal and creative nonfiction essays should be 1,000 - 5,000 words in length. Poetry submissions should be 1-5 pages in length. 

Submission Deadline:  December 1, 2019.

Author Acceptance Notifications:  February 10, 2020.

Publication: May, 2020.

Please email submissions as an attached word document with the subject line “NMR Special Issue 2020” followed by the genre of the piece to mlatta@marian.edu, cc’ editor@thenorthmeridianreview.org