White Wall Review’s 55th issue will explore DIRT.

Not just dirt as mess, but dirt as method, material, and metaphor. What do we bury? What grows from those seeds? What clings to us no matter how hard we clean? Let’s get down and dirty!

We are looking for short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, visual art, and photography that explore all the dirty things we’re told to scrub away… and what happens when they stick around. In a culture obsessed with cleanliness, what does it mean to stay filthy? When is dirt shameful, or when is it freeing? What happens when we refuse to be refined?

We’re interested in work that isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty. Resist all temptation towards purity or polish; this is your chance to bare the ugly truth. Dirt is where our bodies meet the world; it’s blood, sweat, sex, illness, and decay. It’s gossip and scandal, rumours and lies. It’s witchcraft, relics, ashes, bones, and ancestry. Think worms and roots and mycelium and all those creatures churning the ground beneath us.

We invite stories that lean into the visceral and sensorially grotesque, or the human and tender, the base, the sacred, the profane. Send us work that smells, stains, bruises, and maybe even eventually blooms into something new.

We’re especially drawn to:

• Filth as a social construct: taboo, stigma, abjection
• Bodies as sites of desire and disgust
• Gossip, scandal, secrets
• Domestic dirt and the labour of cleaning
• Food, indulgence, rot, nourishment, excess
• The underground/unseen: bacteria, parasites, gut biomes, worms, roots
• Ritual, spellwork, cleansing, revelation, intimacy
• Ancestors, digging into the past, getting close to your roots
• Crime, seediness, moral grime
• Horror that unsettles
• Construction, foundations, sculpture, things built and unearthed
• Death, burial, dust-to-dust cycles
• Rebirth and revolution; starting again from what’s been broken down

Bring us the raw, the uncensored, the worst moments. Bring us beauty in the ordinary. Bring us DIRT.