Autumn 2022

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Editors

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Fiction Contributors

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Artwork Contributors

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Nonfiction Contributors

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Drama Contributors

This Autumn Issue marks our two-year anniversary since we established Spellbinder. Like last year, we have invited all of our contributors to join us for an online birthday party, complete with guest readings, games and plenty of news about Spellbinder’s important milestones. We will also be inviting attendees to make their own fictional themed drinks which they can bring along to the session. Recipes for these will be posted on our social media platforms. This online function will give everyone an opportunity to meet the team and to network with other creatives. We hope to meet many of you there, and encourage you to bring your friends and family along to join our unique creative community. Our anniversary event will also involve a short awards ceremony in which we will give a certificate and some merchandise to one winner selected by our editors from the contributors published in each genre category this year. We also hope to be able to nominate our award winners for internationally recognised prizes in the very near future. 

In addition to our anniversary party, you can look forward to the revival of Spellbinder’s Twelve Days of Christmas, which we had such a blast curating for you all last year, during our Autumn season leading up to our Winter issue. Previously, we have given you twelve days of international Christmas recipes and an equal number of Christmas themed activities. This year, we will compile twelve days of Christmas reading suggestions and an equal number of Christmas traditions from around the world, which we very much hope you will find interesting. We have chosen to place a huge emphasis on the internationality of our magazine for both the 2021 and 2022’s advent calendars because we are incredibly proud of our magazine’s reach across the globe and want to continue to promote different voices from different cultures. 

One year ago, we set ourselves four main goals, which we recorded on the special Reflections page of our website. The first target we made was to publish works by individuals from an even greater range of countries across the globe. Since last October, our contributors have identified with nineteen different national identities. This is an increase compared to our first year’s total of seventeen. We are so proud to have successfully expanded even further. As promised, we launched the Spellbinder podcast, Spellchats, to accompany our long-running Medium blog, Spellnotes. Adding this platform on Spotify gave us a chance to explain to readers why Spellbinder was created and to tell them more about the ethos behind our publication. We also committed to hosting more events for our followers in 2021-2022 and therefore we collaborated with Prospectus magazine on a writing workshop led by the speculative poet, Jeannine Gailey. Last of all, we set out to acquire 1000 Instagram followers during our second year, which we succeeded in doing in April. Although we didn’t set specific targets for our other social media platforms, we are proud to write that our Twitter account has now surpassed 4000 followers. Our social media following had the opportunity to enter a prize-giveaway to celebrate each of our social media milestones. 

This issue is also momentous because it is the first one for which contributors will receive an honorarium. Whilst we regret we did not have the funds to do this until this point, we are now very excited that we can reward the talent displayed by our writers and artists with a small payment. 

Another important aspect for the upcoming Autumn season is the launch of our initiative to promote past contributors’ successes. In order to stay in touch with our contributors beyond their publication in Spellbinder and to promote their fantastic achievements, we have decided to create a page on our website where we can advertise the publishing and exhibition deals secured by our writers and artists. This promotional page will also appear in our magazine, alongside our long-established advertisement page for other literary and art magazines. We hope that this initiative will help our creatives connect with more readers and viewers, and inspire everyone to remain motivated in their craft.

We are also pleased to have recently set up our merchandise store on RedBubble, where you can purchase hats, tops, hoodies, phone cases, mugs, tote bags, notebooks and magnets, with a choice of four Spellbinder designs. All designs are also available in water-resistant sticker format so you can decorate other belongings such as water bottles too. Prices range from £0.76 to £40.81, and RedBubble ships to most countries worldwide, offering you the opportunity to purchase in your own currency. We hope that you will wear your Spellbinder cap or carry your Spellbinder travel mug with pride. 

BREAKING NEWS: Spellbinder magazine transforms 21st century fashion! 

Well, at least we aim high.

As always, we are so proud of our talented contributors and thank each and every one of you who submit to, follow or read Spellbinder magazine. Just as we did last Autumn, we have expanded our team again so that we have even more highly skilled and professional editors to read every submission we receive. Now going into our third year, Linda and I, as the two remaining Co-Founders, have high hopes for even greater expansion for the magazine and success for everyone involved in its production and creation. For now, have a peaceful and creative Autumn, full of falling flurries of imaginative thought. 

Autumn is a time of change and decay, but also a season in which we ponder all that is to come when life is reborn again in Spring. Spellbinder’s publication schedule is in sync with this beautiful cycle of the natural world and, in times like these, of climate crisis, it is important that we rediscover this deep connection between human existence and nature’s ever-evolving course. So, with this in mind, I will leave you with some words from Virginia Woolf: “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves…”

Amber Kennedy, Editor in Chief

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We have created a playlist inspired by the Autumn 2022 Issue. Feel free to play it while reading the issue:

Poetry shortlist – Autumn 2022

Laura Hemmington	spoon sweets for the unbelievers
Nathaniel Frankland	The World is your Oyster
MP Powers	Prelude to a Non-Existent Past
David Ford	The Event
Rachel Finney	A Poem for Mid March

Fiction shortlist – Autumn 2022

Greg Sendi	The Peshaman Fragments
Alice Florence	Orr Sky Path
Sára Bányai	Sacre du Council

Drama shortlist – Autumn 2022

Anne Undeland	King of the Dink
Christine Emmert	River Stones
William Ivor Fowkes	Stage Directions