Tendon Magazine

Tendon is the literary and visual arts journal published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. Our masthead can be found here, and our most recent issue can be found here. 

Call for Submissions

For our next issue, Tendon is accepting poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art engaging with the politics and poetics of care. Care, cura, is double-edged: it names both the burden and solicitude of turning towards others. While care is often assumed to be the latter—a sentimental act of giving—we invite work that considers care beyond its usual coordinates, or indeed breaks down this binary of care’s contradictory tensions. We are interested in pictures of care that illuminate ethical quandaries and messy complexities through attention to concrete details. Perhaps you follow care to where it frays: straining, collapsing, becoming ambivalent, or laced through with harm. Maybe you depict care as unequally distributed, withheld, or requested in impossible conditions. We are especially interested in senses of care that point beyond dominant moral frameworks and hegemonic practices. We welcome submissions that explore:

• Intimacy and difficulties of caregiving
• Effects of burnout and precarity on care networks
• Informal infrastructures of survival and solidarity
• Care as a form of mutual aid, organizing, refusal, or resistance
• Affective and aesthetic textures of maintenance, staying, witnessing
• Entanglements of care with race, gender, sexuality, disability, migration, and class
• Literary, visual, and hybrid forms that look to represent the complexities of care 

Some guiding questions:
💭 What does it mean to “stay with” or “stay near” others over time?
👀 Who is seen as worthy of care, and who is excluded or forgotten?
⏳ What happens when care fails, frays, or exhausts someone’s capacities?
🏚️ What forms of care emerge in the absence of institutions, or when institutions prove harmful?
⚖️ How do we make space for affective complexities—guilt, resentment, obligation—within care relations?
🌱 When do care and empathy intersect, and when do they diverge?
🔥 Can care contain cruelty, coercion, ambivalence, or even violence?
✊ How might we speak of radical care—when care and organizing intersect?
🎨 What does it mean to depict care without sentimentalizing it?
🖋️ How can writing and art enact care, not just depict it?

This issue is in dialogue with scholars and creative workers who have reimagined care as survival, improvisation, or an incomplete but vital practice. We welcome work across genres that approaches care as both subject and method.

Submissions are due by November 1, 2025, or when we reach our submission caps in each genre.