Call For Submission: Editors Wanted & Our March Special Issue

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Luna Luna is seeking two new assistant editors/curators for our 1) Intersectional Feminism & 2) Lifestyle verticals. These magical, wonderful geniuses will help us curate new voices and diversify our content and contributor base.

Our assistant editor roles are flexible; we provide the opportunity to take creative liberty as it relates to your skills. So long as you sync with the brand, or you feel you can better the brand, we want to work with you.

It is vital that Luna Luna be home to a wide array of voices and identities. We want to provide a platform to underrepresented, marginalized, underprivileged and silenced voices.

To apply: lunalunamag@gmail.com. Send us a note, a reason, a love letter, or your story. Please send specific ideas around how you can help us and how we can help you or support your vision. Be able to contribute 2 hours per week, volunteer (as all of our editorships are at this time). Communicative, social-media savvy people, please.

Also! We're seeking content for our special issue on RELATIONSHIPS & LOVE. Personal essays or features welcome. Video and photo welcome. Word count: 500-1200.  Due March 1.

Possible topics:

• Monogamy hardships
• Friendship hardships
• Positive LGBTQIA experiences
• Asexuality
• Being single
• Race & romance / sex
• Disability & dating
• Race & friendship
• Dating in X location
• Essays on craft (writing about sex, teaching sex writing)
• LGBTQIA challenges (social, familial, romantic)
• Bisexuality challenges
• Polyamory & open relationships
• Sexual liberation
• History of sexual, platonic and romantic relationships in a culture/era (ex., a look at Victorian-era female friendship)
• Literary/cinema roundups that deal with the topics above
• Interviews with experts, artists, etc around the topics above

NYU's Spellbinding Language of The Birds Exhibit Showcases Occult Art

BY LARISA CASILLAS

'Your head is a haunted house.'

Sometime during the Occult Humanities Conference this phrase was uttered and it stuck with me throughout.

Afterwards, during a private viewing of Language of the Birds: Occult and Art (which will show at NYU February 12-13) I was able to see what it meant. 

Spanning over a century of occult art, the exhibition has 60 works by different modern and contemporary artists who delved deep into their minds and tried to transcend rationality. The exhibition is curated by Pam Grossman, the creator of the occult blog Phantasmaphile and also the co-organizer of the Occult Humanities Conference.  

"By going within, then drawing streams of imagery forth through their creations, each of these artists seeks to render the invisible visible, to materialize the immaterial, and to tell us that we, too, can enter numinous realms," she writes.

Language of the Birds is divided into 5 sections: Cosmos, Spirits, Practitioners, Altars and Spells. The art ranges from the visually beautiful to the unnerving and intellectually engaging; from Aleister Crowley’s alter ego self-portrait, Ken Henson’s portrait of the goddess Ishtar, Robert Buratti’s dreamy Sub Rosa and Paul Laffoley’s Astrological Ouroboros, with the twelve signs of the zodiac paired with the twelve stages of changes of attitude toward life--each piece challenges you to feel rather than analyze.

Speaking to Luna Luna about the current appeal magic and the occult has on the younger generation, Grossman cited that for women it honors cycles and gives agency, "witchcraft is about embracing the body,"  she says. And as for men, it gives them the freedom to explore alternative types of spirituality--"you don’t just need one book," she concluded.

Language of the Birds: Occult and Art
January 12 – February 13, 2016
80WSE, 80 Washington Square East, NYC
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

All images via here.

The Oscars Ought To Look In The Mirror

If the Oscars looked in the mirror--and the Oscars really, really need to--the Oscars would see white men. Haven't they learned anything from last year's diversity gap (and that's putting it nicely)? 

This year, the committee pulled the same nonsense. 

While the racial breakdowns are SCARY problematic, here's a tiny, tiny glimpse into just how bad it is: Creed (written AND directed by a black man) and Straight Outta Compton (starring black actors) were recognized. But it was the white men in the mix that were nominated. The white men. 

This is not a test.

It's hard to understand the bias against people of color and women that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has--considering all of the amazing art being made--but one thing is certain: they're not too concerned with changing it. 

In 2015, the Academy welcomed 322 new members to counter its diversity problem (overwhelmingly made up white males over the age of 50; in 2013, it was 93% male.) 

Are these new members making a dent?

The problem is with all of Hollywood and all of America; it's sexist. When it comes to women, the numbers are awful: 22% of the Academy are made up of women--women who are underpaid and undervalued (props to J-Law for speaking up). The Academy is blind to the fact that people of color need to be represented more (watch this excellent Hollywood Reporter roundtable with Amy Schumer, Gina Roridguez, Tracee Ellis-Ross, and more) and too propped up by its own systemic privilege to make change. So when you're looking at what happens on the outside (like the Oscars whitewash) it's a good indicator that the problem is from the inside.  

When are we going to stop letting people in positions of power make the wrong decisions? We've got another #OscarsSoWhite situation. Keep speaking up. 

Looking Forward: Luna Luna's Risky Relaunch & Our Plans For 2016

BY LISA MARIE BASILE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

On October 31, my staff and I relaunched Luna Luna Magazine. Actually, let me clarify: I forced a relaunch. Fed up with WordPress and its forever-glitchy plugins and crashing themes (we're a volunteer staff who operates late-night from our bedrooms, and we don't have a tech support team), I made the switch to Squarespace. I even bought a brand new URL (to hell with SEO! Just kidding, that's a huge pain point).

This overhaul wasn't conventional, at least not for a content-focused publication. But I wanted something beautiful, something that could create the magic reading experience we envisioned, and I wanted something that reflected our aesthetic. I also wanted that something to be easy for our team, since we're mainly updating on the go. Ah, such is the glamorous life of a niche internet magazine. There were plenty of others variables, and I won't pretend I knew everything, but I believe in big fucking risks that positively impact long-term sustainability.

I made a frightening decision to change our editorial focus and voice too. This is to say that I had push-back as well as major support. A lot of tense G-chat debates and in-person conversations. A lot of excellent points made all around. A lot of weighing clicks versus craft. A lot of wondering if Luna Luna Magazine was repetitive, redundant, messy, wonderful, necessary, unique or impactful.

Joanna (our managing editor and the one I've worked most closely with for the better part of a year+) wanted to ensure the magazine's success in practical ways: consistently publishing content, making sure our pageviews were growing. I too wanted that, but I struggled with the things that tended to make things clickable. I refused to let Luna Luna Magazine become yet another Click This Headline magazine. All things said, Joanna's eye for strong and shareable content has meshed beautifully with my stringent (aka relentlessly pushy) creative direction. (My boyfriend called me the 'witchy Anna Wintour', oh god.)

Intermission: No, for real, props to the Luna Luna Magazine team for being absolutely badass. 

Part of the risk of relaunching this October was in cutting a portion of the kind of content we published. We had started as an edgy, darker arts & culture magazine in the summer of 2013, but we slowly became a daily feminist touch-point. The majority of our content focused on women's rights and feminist first-person essays. I loved this, and meeting so many incredible women and writers did things for my life that for which I am endlessly indebted. Our pageviews skyrocketed.

However, I fell and felt deeply out of touch with our content. I wanted to keep writing about women, but reduce any one niche focus in order to do more of everything: art, culture, the original occult vertical, confession, intersectional content and even bad feminism. We don't want to be perfect; we're explorers. 

We were also publishing so much that I couldn't edit (9-5 jobs, am I right?). I couldn't work with my writers closely and I couldn't go through with a fine-tooth comb to find the voices and perspectives we hadn't published already. I felt that there needed to be a way for me to connect with my writers as much as our readers. After all, Luna Luna, as I envisioned it, was always a community for dialogue and opinion from the inside out. It was about creating a space for readers and writers to be friends, supporters and dreamers together. 

Maybe I'm an idealist. Maybe I'm lacking a sense of entrepreneurialism. But no. I've worked in rigid corporate content institutions, and I've worked at startups where growth at lightspeed (sacrificing quality) was the dominating factor. I've written for clickbait paychecks and I've written beautiful essays that will probably never be seen again. And time and again, I come back to that which makes me proud, makes me uncomfortable, makes me feel I've collected a menagerie of perfect words. 

Balancing that obsession with beauty and slow growth with the way the internet works is a struggle, I won't lie. After all, we want to be able to sell ad space on our new site. In my day job, I'm all SEO and headlines, but at Luna Luna, I can and will take the time to finesse it. 

Since we relaunched, our bounce rate reduced by over 50% - a beautiful thing. Our older site (lunalunamag.com) had more pageviews of course (three years' worth), but people were leaving. Was it the site design? The content? We don't know. Now people are sticking around. Our return visitor rate shows we're building a beautiful community. And our top-viewed articles show that our readers are still coming for the art and staying for the intimacy. This is an area we'll continuously work on.

We have a long way to go. We have to pay our contributors. We have to build a more diverse editorial staff. We have to develop our regional focus (starting with NYC), and we have to do community work. We want to work with organizations, host readings, host speaking series, and throw networking parties. We want to grow sponsorship relationships and make a difference for people on and off the site. This takes time, money, discipline and vision, and we definitely have two of those things. You guess which. 

Our goal is to fundraise for our writers this year, to say thank you, to sell ad spots, to steadily publish beautiful content that is unique and sometimes imperfect, to balance the light and the dark. We aim to balance the markers of actual real world site growth with a continued focus on selectivity and calculated aesthetic development. Those secrets we will keep, but we hope you'll come along. 

And so, I leave you with some of our most popular content pieces as we ended 2015:

13 Aesthetically Beautiful Literary Journals To Submit To & Read

This Is Why My Love Life Has Always Failed

Seeking Arrangement: On My Brief & Failed Attempt at Becoming a Sugar Baby

Stop Saying "I Have A Boyfriend"

James Deen & The Crisis of Media-Appointed Feminist Heroes

40 Books Published in 2015 That Should Be on Your Shelf

A Catalogue of Scars

A Conversation With Poet Megan Falley About Lana Del Rey

Why I Stopped Shaving All of My Body Hair

13 Aesthetically Beautiful Literary Journals To Submit To & Read

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Great writing will always be the most important element for any journal, but being pretty also doesn't hurt. The below publishers have taken time to build an aesthetic world for their contributors and readers, making the read a much more meaningful and whole experience. Whether minimalist or colorfully elaborate, these sites are gorgeously bespoke, thoughtful and filled with talent.

ANTHROPOID
From the publisher: "We love the fundamental business of being humanesque. Issues of identity, culture, belonging or lack, vulnerability, collectivism, the body, ritual–anthropological subjects from a generalist’s view, or, cultural moments from a messy, personal perspective. Tightly snuggled with visuals for each feature, we publish in collected issues and individual articles: ethnography & essays, experiential narratives, fiction & poetry, visuals, conceptual work, and genre-bending, from voices in the literary field, the humanities, and the sciences."

We recommend reading: Aura Girl, by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

PAPERBAG
From the publisher: "Paperbag is interested in presenting larger bodies of visual art, poetry, sound, experiment, and collaboration from established and emerging writers and artists throughout the world."

We recommend reading: Everything Will Be Taken Away, by Morgan Parker

ROGUE AGENT
From the publisher: "If our bodies are oppressed by an outside force, we are "written over." Rogue Agent wants to retaliate. Rogue Agent wants reconciliation. Rogue Agent wants to share your stories about the poem that is the body. "

We recommend reading: Blow Her Up, by Juliet Cook
 

TARPAULIN SKY
From the publisher: "As with Tarpaulin Sky’s books, the magazine focuses on cross-genre / trans-genre / hybrid forms as well as innovative poetry and prose. The journal is not allied with any one style or school or network of writers; rather, we try to avoid some of the defects associated with dipping too often into the same literary gene pool, and the diversity of our contributors is evidence of our eclectic interests."

We recommend reading: A Mouth, A Maw, by Lital Khaikan

PITH
From the publisher: "Pith is an online journal that collects experimental bits. We define “experimental” as something akin to a deep breath of uncertainty; an inclination to remain lost when certainty is calling. Visual/written hybrids, multi-genre writing, erasures….that sort of thing."

We recommend reading: Deus Ex Machina/Rachel, by Jennifer Pilch

BAT CITY REVIEW
From the publisher: "Founded in 2004, Bat City Review is an annual literary journal run by graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, supported by the English Department and the James A. Michener Center for Writers. We read thousands of submissions each year and publish only the best in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art. "

We recommend reading: Afterwards, the boys stand in the kitchen, by Francine J. Harris

AMPERSAND REVIEW
From the publisher: "We are looking for creative work, but only good creative work. Give us God, give us man, give us people & make us laugh. If you can make us cry, do so, if you want to lament loss of pets & family, do not. We enjoy pleasant nonsense & the deeply profound, the sharp little crack of things we don’t speak of in polite company. We want to feel, & we want to want, & we don’t want Cheap Trick jokes inserted here, unless they are awesome. We are strict & unbiased; aesthetic & craft are Queen; we want to read a good piece as much as our readers, so write one before submitting."

We recommend reading: Illness as Matador, by Michael Klein

THE BOILER JOURNAL
From the publisher: "The Boiler began in 2011 by a group of writers at Sarah Lawrence College. We publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction on a quarterly basis. We like work that turns up the heat, whistles, and stands up to pressure."

We recommend reading: Poems by Sarah Ann Winn

PRICK OF THE SPINDLE
From the publisher: "We publish poetry, fiction (from flash to novella-length), drama, creative and academic nonfiction, articles, interviews, literary reviews, film, and visual art. Although we do not publish genre fiction, we are open to different forms. These may be more traditional, but infused with freshness and innovation; or experimental but not chaotic: if it is chaos in complete freedom of form you are aiming at, envelop it within some structure, even if only the structure of meaning. To submit, visit the submission guidelines page for the link to the submission manager."

We recommend reading: In Case of Infection, by Vicki Entreken

LANA TURNER
From the publisher: "The Lana Turner Blog is edited by David Lau. Currently seeking essays or reviews of recent books of poetry, albums, literary criticism, films, film theory, and accounts of contemporary political economy. Accepting proposals for various kinds of journalistic reports. Electronic submission should be sent in one file to dmlau@ucsc.edu. Submissions welcome all year."

We recommend reading: 3 poems from Trilce, by Cesar Vallejo

* Bonus points for publishing Vallejo

BERFROIS
From the publisher: "Berfrois is a literary-intellectual online magazine. It is edited by Russell Bennetts. The site is updated daily. Berfrois is published by Pendant Publishing in London, UK." 

We recommend reading: Doohickey: Vertigo's Elusive Homage, by B. Alexandra Szerlip

SPORKLET
From the publisher: "Sporklet (est’d. 2015) is published quasi-monthly, features poetry & fiction, and occasionally includes solicited art, music, film…"

We recommend reading: Seven poems, by Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein

LA VAGUE
From the publisher: "La Vague publishes eight female poets and eight works by a female artist under a set theme twice a year in January and July. La Vague intends to show the close relationship between poetry and visual art and how certain themes resonate among the contributors."

We recommend reading: Start minting, Uninc, by Candance Wuelhe