Burning House Press are excited to welcome JOHN TREFRY as our seventh guest editor! John will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of August.

Submissions for John are open from today – 1st August and will remain open until 24th August.

John’s Theme for the month is as follows

 

NON-NONFICTION

 

John has introduced the theme for your guidance:

 

“We must invent unheard-of gestures to fit those singular figures. This new way of life which presupposes the annulment of spontaneous life is precisely what we call understanding and enjoyment of art. Not that this life lacks sentiments and passions, but those sentiments and passions evidently belong to a flora other than that which covers the hills and dales of primary human life. What those ultra-objects evoke in our inner artist are secondary passions, specifically aesthetic sentiments.”

—José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art

This is a program for non-representational literary products in which words are not mediators but things, writing that is less “about” something than it simply “is” something. These texts serve as a meditative object that enhances one’s connection to their surroundings and to one’s own interior, not the interior of another unknowable consciousness, and not toward an articulation of “truth.”  This is not fiction. It is nonfiction without content.

This is a program whose texts are overwhelmingly allusive without ever noting their referents, where human beings only exist as ciphers whose names have grammatical value in the text, not because they are especially alluring organisms. Text forms, or formal vehicles of text that are not time-dependent, do not demand causality, for example: exegeses of science or humanities, visual glossaries, catalogs, fraudulent criticism, mythology, lists, curated jargon, directions, instruction manuals, screenplays for natural history documentaries. Texts that revel in language, with the pure fascination of prose, and without the constraint of the human desire to unburden the spirit, yet still with the exceedingly concrete duty of conveying information, albeit desperately, hilariously inaccurate.

 

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John Trefry is an architect and a writer who edits publications from Inside the Castle in Lawrence, Kansas.

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For submissions, John is looking for your poetry, short stories, flash fiction, prose poems, art, collage, painting, photography – as well as non-fiction submissions: essays, reviews, commentary, features, interviews – and all hybrids, fragments and cross-forms.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions should be sent as attachments to guesteditorbhp@gmail.com

Please state the theme and form of your submission in the subject of the email. For example: NON-NONFICTION/POETRY

Poetry and Fiction
For poetry submissions, submit no more than three of your best poems. Short stories should be limited to 1,500 words or (preferably) less. We encourage flash fiction submissions, no more than three at a time. Send these in as a .doc or .docx file, along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.

Art
Submit hi-res images of your works (drawings, paintings, illustrations, collages, photography, etc) with descriptions of the work (Title, Year, Medium, etc) in the body of the email. Files should be in .JPEG unless they are GIFs or videos, and should not exceed 2MB in size for each work. File names should correspond with the work titles. Video submissions can be uploaded onto Youtube or Vimeo for feature on our website. Send these submissions along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.

Non-fiction
Non-fiction submissions (essays, reviews, commentary, interviews, etc) should be no more than 1, 500 words and sent as a .doc or .docx file along with your third-person bio/and optional photograph.

Submissions are open from 1st till 24th August – and will reopen again on 1st September for our eighth guest editor.

BHP online is now in the capable hands of the amazing JOHN TREFRY – friends, arsonistas, send John your magic!