A new Nairobi-based print and online magazine, down river road, is exploring the margins, the shifting centers, and the new spaces through literature, music, and visual art. In an email to Brittle Paper, one of its editors Frankline Sunday described it as being interested in “alternative forms of creating and expression.”

Its first print issue, Place, was published in December 2019 and launched this month in Nairobi. The magazine is now calling for submissions to its second issue, Ritual. It is offering “a token payment of $30 for each piece we publish online and/or on print, and two complimentary contributor’s copy of the journal.” The issue will be edited by Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, who is Series Editor, alongside Wairimu Muriithi and Carey Baraka.

Here is the call.

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ISSUE 2. RITUAL

In thinking about this, our second issue, we retreat to the processes of daily humanizations, from taking a morning shit to ancestral veneration to daily commute to un/dressing and beyond: Ritual.

Ritual, viz., the ways in which we be, the ways in which we are, the ways in which we play and work and rest and create, the ways in which we gather, the ways in which we seek and do solitude.

We invite submissions across forms that seek to query doing ways and being ways and living ways and dying ways and every way in between. Send us your poetry, your fiction, your essays, your music, your art, your photography, your wozzap voicenotes, your selves, and distill with us the rituals of human existence.

We can take:

  • 3-5 poems of a maximum of 40 lines each
  • prose between 3500 – 5000 words (though we can flex on this)
  • flash non/fiction and experimental written forms (mathogothanio) between 500 – 1000 words
  • send up to four visuals
  • for audio pieces, send up to four if not longer than ten minutes each, or one long piece if it exceeds 20 minutes

drr is in its founding stages with no financial backing and at the moment we can only offer a token payment of $30 for each piece we publish online and/or on print, and two complimentary contributor’s copy of the journal.

We look forward to working together in bringing forth and interrogating all the rituals that make us who we are.

Please send your submissions to [email protected] with your name and title of your piece as the subject line.

The deadline for submission is March 31st 2020.

Editors

Series Editor:

Neo Sinoxolo MUSANGI masquerades as many things: a writer, a performance artist, a forager and a teaching academic, among several other banalities. They like to pretend that they live in Kajiado as an excuse to not DO Nairobi, and its Nairobiness.

Editors:

Wairimu Muriithi is a writer with many other names. She is lactose intolerant but cannot give up cheese.

Carey Baraka is a writer from Kisumu, Kenya. He sings for a secret choir in Nairobi.

Karibuni!

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Check out down river road.