All My Relations

All My Relations Volume 2 is an art and lit, online and printed magazine, exploring the struggle against colonization—past and present. This volume is open to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color only, in consideration of the theme. While we understand that some white folks have historically experienced colonization, we want to amplify the specific and perpetual struggles of our BIPOC relations. Own voices only, please.

We are not looking for graphic or traumatic stories or dark fictional pieces about death or genocide written for shock value. We do not require that you center your or your relations’ trauma surrounding colonization. And we are not interested in the single story of harm and suffering. (Check out this important TED talk from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on “The danger of a single story.”)

We are looking for honest pieces reflecting on your ancestors, pieces commemorating your memories (or imaginations if memories don’t exist) of lost elders and/or relatives (whoever your relatives are to you), pieces exploring the myriad of feelings that come from decolonizing your history or your communities’ histories, pieces explaining rituals (either cultural or adopted) that help you cope with the effects of colonization, musings on alternate universes where colonization never occurred, reflections on a colonization-free future, etc. We are looking for pieces that honor your ancestors and communities, honor your journey through decolonization, imagine the absence of colonization, and/or aid in communal healing.

We are committed to editing with an equity lens, ensuring any edits are for clarity and not stylistic in nature. We are committed to never alter a writing style, the intention of a piece, or change the voice in any way. If we ever fail or come up short in this attempt, please do let us know.

We are free to submit to and free to read. We will accept one written piece or piece of artwork per person and hope to respond within one month.

To submit, fill out our submission form (one piece per entry in the form). We will read submissions in the order they were received. The submission period will be open through January 1, 2022 or until we reach 100 pages. Be sure to read all our guidelines below before submitting.

Volume 1 explored the theme of familial (blood, adopted, affirming, community, or other “family”) loss or ancestry. Read the complete volume here.

Header image: The back of a street sign with a sticker that says “Keep Calm and Decolonize” taken in Historic Guadalupe, Santa Fe, New Mexico by Paul Sableman (CC BY 2.0).

The Team

We’re the masthead, the team, the folx reviewing your work:

Dana Riding an XBox 360 Controller — Chris

Chris (they/them) is the primary editor. They are a trans nonbinary, queer, triracial artist and writer who has been writing mostly creative nonfiction (but occasionally delves into Sci Fi shorts or haikus and tankas) and creating educomics for nearly 20 years.

Dana (he/him) is the secondary editor if Chris is not sure about a piece. He is a hobbyist CGI artist and photographer, and the primary editor of Chris’s works.

The team will occasionally tap someone in the lit community to read a piece (without the creator’s name included) if there is a question regarding identity that Chris or Dana don’t have experience with within the piece.

More information about Chris and Dana can be found on the bios page.

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Requirements for Submissions

What we expect from submissions:

We expect submissions to be on the theme of familial loss. We don’t define family because we know that word means something different to everyone.

We require written submissions to be under 5,000 words for fiction and nonfiction and under 5 pages for poetry, submitted in a Word Document or text file. PDFs will not be considered and will be rejected outright. Submissions must be in English as, unfortunately, that is the only language we can read. Do feel free to add words in a language other than English and we will consult Google or other resources, but the submission must be primarily in English.

We require that image submissions be sent at least 300 dpi and at least 3 inches by 3 inches. To be considered for cover art, the image must be at least either 11.25 inches tall or 8.65 inches wide.

We require that you properly gender our editor. Any submission that misgenders will be responded to unread. If you wish to address the editor, you can do so as editor, All My Relations, or Chris. If you wish to speak about our editor, they use the pronouns they/them.

We will accept simultaneous submissions. Please let us know if it is a simultaneous submission (in the “Anything you want our editors to know about your piece” section of the form) and let us know as soon as you do if it has been accepted elsewhere.

Our form requires the following information: your name as you’d like it to appear, the name of the piece as you’d like it to appear, trigger warnings if necessary, and answers to our identity questions.

We aim to have a diverse publication from a diverse set of voices. In order to make sure we do that, we need to know who you are. We will not deny someone based on identity unless it is deemed that the submission becomes inappropriate or appropriation due to the submitter’s identity. Things that we would consider inappropriate or appropriation would include writing about what it’s like to be part of a historically marginalized community you do not belong to. We encourage people outside of the community to include people from historically marginalized communities, but we won’t publish pieces that explain what it’s like to be part of those communities. We value inclusivity and believe the only way to do it right is with #OwnVoices.

We don’t want to read something that might be triggering without being in the right head space. We would hate to deny something because it caught us off guard at a bad time. If appropriate, please include a trigger warning. Before you submit, make sure that it will not violate our submission guidelines (see the full list below).

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Safety

Recently, there’s been a few people in the lit community who have been exposed as predators and abusers. We want our publication to be a safe space:

If you are a survivor and we have published the work of someone who has harmed you, please let us know who and what would feel like a just response to you. We’ve created a report form (with suggested actions) if you do not feel comfortable reaching out via email.

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What You Can Expect From Us

Rights, publication, copies, and payment information:

You retain the rights to your pieces after publication in our zine. We encourage you to submit your piece to other publications after it has appeared in ours (if their submissions allow it), we just ask that you acknowledge that it was previously published in ours first. We fully accept pieces that have been published elsewhere (if their submissions allow it) and will be happy to acknowledge that it was published elsewhere first. We want to get your creations in front of as many people as possible and are happy to do it!

Once the piece has been published, it is done. If we made a typo, we’d be happy to fix it, but we will not pull the piece or make any large edits. You have until the piece goes to print to make any changes to the piece. If there are large changes that change the tone, feeling, or reading of the piece, it will have to go back to our readers and may not be accepted with the changes.

Submitter copies. We can’t afford to send submitter copies. We beta tested it, and would have lost our shirts if it hadn’t been for a last-minute angel investor. We will send a PDF of the issue to any submitter who wants one so they can get it printed and we offer copies to our submitters at cost (estimated around $6-8 per issue, depending largely on the number of color pages and how many copies).

Who and how we pay. We wish we could pay everyone for their work, but we don’t make enough cash for that to be a possibility at this time. So, we will pay a modest amount for unpublished works through PayPal only (An equal share of 50% of the proceeds collected through the sale of issues and Ko-fi. The other 50% will go towards paying for the costs of this publication, including internet, website fees and hosting, fees on our various platforms, and miscellaneous printing and shipping costs. We will not be paying for previously published works at this time, but will continue to accept them.) to our Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) submitters, gender variant (agender/greygender, bigender/polygender, intergender/intersex, nonbinary/gender non-conforming, transgender) submitters, and disabled submitters. We are committed to paying at least $10 and will donate what is not raised from our personal funds.

Why these creatives specifically? Because these creatives are the least likely to be paid for their published works or equitably paid in their day jobs. Our publication has committed to prioritizing traditionally marginalized creators, and this is another way we can do that.

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Things that will be rejected outright and could get you temporarily or permanently banned from All My Relations and The B’K:

If your submission violates any of the guidelines below, you will be informed and temporarily banned from submitting to any Talbot-Heindl publication for one month’s time. A rejection for violating a guideline is not the start of an argument. You have submitted to our publication, so follow our rules.

If it is a flagrant violation or you argue with us or respond aggressively to a rejection for any reason, you will be permanently banned.

Likewise, even if your submissions to us are not problematic, but we are informed of problematic behavior outside of our publication against people from marginalized communities and can verify it, you will not be welcome to our publication and we reserve the right to remove your work from past issues.

Here is our list of violations:

The piece implicates you in a crime.
The piece is partially or fully plagiarized.
The piece uses fridging of marginalized people or children (the trope where a marginalized person is injured, killed, or demoralized in some way to move a privileged person’s story or character development forward).
The piece reduces people from marginalized genders or races to body parts, objects, or in another way dehumanizes them.
The piece’s main focus is sexual attraction or exploitation.
The piece is erotica or is sexually explicit.
The piece sexualizes a child. This means anyone under 18 years old, no matter what.
The piece glorifies or sexualizes violence against marginalized genders.
The piece is a fiction, poetry, or art piece that mentions or implies molestation, sexual assault, or r*pe
- We will only consider nonfiction that has been personally experienced by the author, which will be judged on a case-by-case basis. There is NO wiggle room on this. Our editor is a survivor and will not subject themself to the pain of reading this unless it is written by a survivor about their own experience (because we value and understand the need for catharsis through art). NO ONE ELSE is permitted to submit a piece with any of these topics mentioned; NO FICTION, POETRY, OR ART PIECE is permitted with these topics mentioned or implied.
- In the case of personally experienced nonfiction, all the other guidelines still apply – any mention or implication MUST NOT be sexually explicit or regarding a child, etc – and there must be a CLEAR INDICATION of what is contained within in the trigger warning area (That means stating “sexual assault” if the piece includes a mention of sexual assault. Weaker synonyms and euphemisms don’t help us prepare or know if we’re ready to read the piece).
- Honestly, if you’re unsure of how to submit it after reading this guideline, don’t. Err on not submitting it and finding a different publication to submit to rather than harming our editor.
- Any violation of this guideline and sub-sections of this guideline will result in an instant permanent ban from our publication. The trauma is too great and therapy is too expensive to deal with this.
The piece includes content or pejoratives that could be considered racist, xenophobic, queerphobic, transphobic, sexist, misogynistic, fetishist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, ableist, audistic, or in any other way offensive to a protected class or minority. Pieces that include an unreliable narrator will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, but will be rejected unless it is made clear within the piece that the behavior/language is unacceptable.

Land Acknowledgement

All My Relations is made on the ancestral traditional lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (the Seven Council Fires) peoples. This area was also the site of trade, hunting, gathering, and healing of other Indigenous peoples, including the Comanche, Apache, and Shoshone. In offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty, history, knowledge, and experiences.