Hello. Hi there. Hola.
My name is Rebecca Paredes, and I’m here to welcome you to the launch of Glossy Planet, a literary magazine that publishes words as alive and unruly as the moment we live in.
Like many of you, I occasionally* (*often) spend time doomscrolling and lamenting the state of the world—the persistent strife, the steady descent into disorder, the ever-looming threat of the world burning—and, as a creative person, this mindset is not super conducive to, you know, creating. Whether you are a poet, a writer, and/or a hybrid creative, you, too, may have experienced the following crushing and existential thought:
Why create anything when it feels like it won’t matter in the grand scheme of everything?
Reader, I get it.
Maybe you create because you want to share something about how you feel. You create because it allows you to better understand yourself and the human condition—but creating feels harder when we think about the looming AI singularity, and microplastics intake, and what happens if we don’t pay attention to the check engine light because, honestly, we’re this close to crashing out.
And yet, you feel that persistent pull to make something. You look at your notebooks and your Notes app full of jotted lines and snippets of conversation and think, “The seed is there, but I have yet to meaningfully water it, because I feel as though I live in a persistent drought.”
We know that people are writing and creating beautiful work. We know this because books are still being published, literary communities are still alive, and indie bookstores and libraries will save us all—but why do we write? How do we consider our work in the context of the endless barrage of tensions that exist today? What is the point in the face of all of those headlines?
The headlines, I would argue, are the point.
We write, and we read, and we share what we write because art gives us ways to navigate emotions that sometimes feel too big to keep in our heads—and finding a community that responds to art is one way we retain our tether to what it means to be human. Empathetic, imperfect, creative humans.
I have this quote from the great Mary Oliver near my desk:
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
And that brings us to Glossy Planet.
Glossy Planet exists to publish writing that responds to the world in real time: short, sharp, and urgent pieces that value impact over perfection. This is a space for writers to express their creative power by turning toward the world, not retreating from it.
I often think about conversations I have with writers who want to respond to what’s happening in the world right now, but aren’t sure how. Writing prompts have always been an important part of my writing practice for exactly this reason: constraints give you a starting point, but also room to explore and respond. On the first of every month, we’ll have a new challenge for you to respond to. Challenges close on the 15th, and we’ll publish winners during the final week of the following month. First place wins $1,000, second place wins $200, and third place wins $100.
For prose, send us up to 1,000 words. For everything else, send up to two pages. Our monthly challenges encourage writers to write and respond in two weeks—long enough to craft something that resonates with what we face today, in a short enough window that you won’t quite have time to agonize over every single word. That’s the point. We want the writing that feels like it sprung out of you, something that feels like you had to write this right now, in this moment, in whatever form works for your piece.
Big emphasis on that last part—“whatever form works for your piece.” If you’re a poet but feel called to write in flash prose, go for it. If you’re strictly a fiction writer but find that an epistolary essay is the only way that feels right to respond to a prompt, send it. If you’ve never published anything before, great. We want to read it.
We welcome all forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, hybrid, or something even genre goblins can’t categorize. If it’s urgent, sharp, and just a little weird, we want to read it. We’re looking for anything under 1,000 words of prose or up to two pages of poetry that makes us stop and feel something. Keep an eye on our homepage for the release of our first challenge on Oct. 1, and add upcoming challenges to your calendar here.
Most importantly: Write like it matters. Because it does.
Thanks for joining us on this ride.
Rebecca Paredes
Editor, Glossy Planet
