be:longing is the proud winner of the ACT Government’s Multicultural Art, Media or Culture Award for 2022!
Welcome to be:longing, an online publication exploring personal experiences of migration, cross-cultural interactions, nostalgia and feelings of divided (or shared) cultural belonging. We created this space to gather written and visual pieces on anything that touches on those difficult-to-articulate feelings that can arise when your cultural story isn’t quite like “everyone else’s”.
Whether you’ve migrated from one culture to another (or back and forth between them), grown up in a culture that is different to your parents’, or your family has roots in multiple cultures, be:longing is the place for you. For us! For anyone who has ever experienced the complexities of living a multidimensional cultural existence.
Submissions process / contributing your story:
If you would like to contribute part of your story, please get in touch! We accept submissions in the following main categories, but are keen to see anything you would like to contribute:
- poetry;
- thoughts and stories (eg, reflections, fictional or non-fictional stories, memoirs, opinion pieces);
- visual works (eg, photography, art of any kind (submitted via photographs of the art pieces), videography / short film); and
- folk and food-related pieces (eg, recipes / food stories, or pieces that reflect on your engagement in traditional or culturally-specific practices including cooking, artisanal practices, handicrafts, folk dance, culturally-specific customs, performance, etc).
Don’t feel pressured to distill your entire life into one submission, either. Humans are complex beings, so we very much welcome multiple pieces.
Either send us your work directly (to belongingmag@gmail.com), or describe your idea in a few sentences (around 100 words) in the form at the bottom of this page and we will get back to you!
Submissions guidelines:
- For written submissions, we request that the piece has a maximum of 1,000 words and a maximum of 4 accompanying photos;
- For visual submissions (photography, art, sculpture, etc), we request a short paragraph describing the piece and how it engages with the themes of the site (to be posted alongside the submission); and
- For submissions submitted in a language (or languages) other than English, we request an English translation (to be posted alongside the original).
We will consider including submissions that fall outside of these guidelines on a case-by-case basis.
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
Editorial team for 2023 / who we are:
Chief Editors (and Founders):
- Dunja Kaczmarek (Chief Editor, Projects and Events)
- Jasmine Soukieh (Chief Editor, Online Publication)
Supporting editors in 2023:
- Marissa Rodriguez Schimizzi (Arts Editor)
- Ibtisam Shahbaz (Poetry and Writing Editor)
- Vesna Cvjetićanin (Contributing Editor)
- Narmadhaa Sivaraja (Assisting Editor)
- Jey Gar (Assisting Editor)
- Lavanya Oruganti (Acquisitions Editor)
- Margarita Gurgutsova (Projects / Social Media Editor)
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Thank you to our supporting editors in 2022:
- Vesna Cvjetićanin (Contributing Editor)
- Narmadhaa Sivaraja (Roving / Acquisitions Editor)
- Kirandeep Grewal (Arts Editor).
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If you would like to join the be:longing editorial team, get in touch! We are a volunteer-run publication, and are always keen to meet and collaborate with new people. If you love thinking about cross-cultural issues and are interested in writing, editing, art and photography, running live and/or online events, exploring multimedia, social media marketing, podcasting, etc – or have any other ideas – we’d love to hear from you!
Acknowledgements:
We would like to thank those who have helped us to make be:longing what it is today. While there are too many to mention, we would like to acknowledge the efforts, in particular, of Kirandeep Grewal, Narmadhaa Sivaraja, Win Yee Tan, Teresa Sadkowsky, Kai Ito, Relja Cvjetićanin, Ella Kurz, Anita Patel and Abeir Soukieh. We love you guys!
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