Tendon Magazine

Issue 09: Witness | Call for Submissions

Tendon is a literary and visual arts journal printed and published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. Check out our latest issue here.

For our upcoming issue, Tendon is accepting poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art engaging with the theme of witness. At face value, to witness is to be present and observant at a particular place and time. Witness is both noun and verb, invoking at once role and action in the name of investigation, and deriving from the Old English ‘ġewitnes,’ meaning ‘to testify’ or ‘to see with one’s own eyes.’ To bear witness is an assumption of responsibility in proving—or at least protecting—truth. It can also denote the intent and practice of being with others: standing beside another person in times of joy or suffering, carrying their stories when they cannot carry them on their own, shining light on wrongful accusations, or simply refusing to look away. There are many positions a witness can occupy: bystander, advocate, adversary, ally, sentinel, caregiver, friend, archivist, documentarian, poet.

But is to witness to truly know? Who is believed? Whose testimony carries authority, and in what voice? And how are power, (in)justice, and agency intertwined in the act of bearing witness? How can serving as a witness function both as an autonomous act and something that can happen to someone? When and how does one carry a moral obligation to document and intervene, or instead choose the position of silence or inaction?

We invite particular attention to depictions of witness in medicine and care: witnessing illness, death, pain, and systemic failures in healthcare; the responsibility to do no harm; and the ways palliative care asks us to accompany another person through suffering and dying. What happens when witnessing becomes a source of moral injury or an enduring burden? Conversely, what might it mean to witness as an act of friendship or camaraderie—to have peers accompany us through formative experiences and remember the people we were becoming?

We are also interested in work about witness in relation to broad arcs of time. What is retained by bodies and landscapes over time? How do ecosystems and infrastructures serve as witnesses to human violence and environmental change? What traces remain when early human witnesses are made invisible, with languages or histories erased or obscured by palimpsest? Lastly, how can art and literature preserve or reanimate what institutions have ignored or distorted? Can art bring us close to another person's experience without claiming ownership of it? Can a work of fiction bear witness to lives an author has not lived? And how does the advent, implementation, and avalanche of artificial intelligence shift the significance of human poetics of witness?

Tendon is interested in these questions as well as the unstable territory between witness and voyeur, testimony and fiction, proximity and intrusion. We welcome submissions that respond to, challenge, complicate, or reimagine the meaning of witness.

Submissions are due by November 1st, 2026, or when we reach our submission caps in each genre.