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 previous issues can be found on our website. Our current call for submissions is below.
Call for Submissions | Issue 07: Rest
A verb as well as a noun, “rest” invokes both activity and motivation as well as pause and contemplation. As a concept, rest touches many aspects of our lives: we recover from illness, injury, and burnout; we look for respite from overwork; we try to get a good night’s sleep; we convalesce.
Rest’s social, biological, and political associations are important but often invisible, threaded into the everyday rhythms of structural forms of harm. For many of us, resting comes along with feelings of guilt or shame. A brief history of the concept and practice of rest reveals that it has often been instrumentalized to enable more labor to take place. Cohorts of artists and authors have sought to invoke the radical potential of rest and link it to resistance by pointing to rest as a racialized and gendered concept. Projects like Rest for Resistance and Nap Ministry highlight who gets to rest, how, for how long, and in what ways, showing that rest always already speaks to structural inequalities and forms of oppression.
For patients—whether living with a disability, recovering from illness, or navigating surveillance and interventions—practices of resting are linked concretely to healing. For caregivers whose companions’ well-being depends on their labor, rest can be essential but hard to come by. Meanwhile, for healthcare workers, conversations about rest revolve around the ways in which overwork affects the quality of care.
Within late capitalist institutions in the United States, rest is accrued as a ‘benefit’ after a certain amount of time spent at work through PTO and FMLA. Rest is framed as a privilege rather than a right, interrupting or undercutting the value of a worker. While on the job in healthcare, clinicians and trainees are on their feet for long hours, deprived of sleep, and expected to operate at a high caliber throughout burnout. Rest is not built into these infrastructures of care.
In this issue, we invite submissions around the theme of rest, its bodily politics, and its role in medicine and care. Who gets to rest, when, and how might we rest better, more nourishingly, together? Tendon invites submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, critical perspectives, and visual arts through November 20, 2024.
We’re looking for poetry exploring the theme of rest. Poems can be written in any form, and prose poetry and hybrid forms are welcomed.
You may submit 1–4 poems (up to 10 pages). If submitting multiple pieces, please submit all poems in a single Word document or PDF.
We are seeking fiction exploring the theme of rest. Perhaps the work feels restful; perhaps not. We’re looking for fiction that surprises, making us aware of the absence of rest like a lump in the throat. We’re looking for sensory or sensual work that invites us to move with or create rest.
We welcome short stories or novel excerpts of up to 5,000 words, or flash fiction (1–3 pieces) up to 1,000 words. If submitting multiple pieces, please submit all pieces in the same document.
Creative nonfiction submissions on the theme of rest can include personal essays or memoir, narrative essays or reportage, ethnographic vignettes or atmospheric scenes, or history written with a flourish. Submissions belong in this category, rather than critical perspectives, if they are driven by narrative, voice, or lyric language.
Longform submissions may be up to 5,000 words, and 1–3 flash nonfiction submissions may be up to 1,000 words each. If submitting multiple pieces, please submit all pieces in one document.
Submissions belong in this category, rather than creative nonfiction, if they are driven by analysis, argumentation, or a brief scholarly intervention. Disciplinary focus may include anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, media studies, gender and sexuality studies, or any discipline or interdisciplinary domain with a humanistic bent.
Please submit only one piece. We rarely publish anything 3,000 words or more, and in most cases consider this the submission word count cap.
Artwork media exploring rest may include (but are not limited to) photography, sculpture, ceramics, painting, mark-making, mixed media, digital art, film/video and installation. Additionally, you will be asked to provide a description of the work. Priority will be given to pieces that effectively translate to print and published online content.
You may submit 1–3 pieces. JPG, PNG, TIF, GIF and PDF formats are accepted as original work or documentation. All video submissions must be provided as embedded web links, such as Vimeo or YouTube. Runtime is limited to ten minutes per video.