5 Things you need to Know as Antiserious Transforms

Dear Readers,

There has been some silence on our part for the past few weeks, and you have been patient with us, for which we are grateful. We have certain things we would like to share with you. It has been more than a year since we started Antiserious and it won’t be wrong to say that it is growing up. It’s also growing in girth, a fact that reminds us that size zero had never been our aim. A little more than a year after its birth, we are happy to report, like all contented parents, that the child is doing well. Without institutional support of any kind, it’s survived heartily on the generosity of our contributors and the interest of our readers. However, it’s time to change the baby’s diet, to continue with the metaphor. The number of submissions has been overwhelming, large enough to send our small editorial team into rich panic. After much (anti)serious deliberation therefore, we’ve decided to make a few changes:

1. We are going to be a Quarterly from now onwards. We are looking for personal essays that go beyond the mainstream media’s idea of the “universal”. We are looking for memoirs that talk about YOU. We are looking for fiction stories that threaten to go beyond what’s accepted and expected in the literary magazines around. (How has no one yet sent us an erotic story?) We are looking for poetry that provokes, speaks to us, revolts in its unpolished rawness. All in all, we want to live by our mission to celebrate the amateurism, the unfinished.

2. Our Blog will, however, continue to be updated frequently, digging up the archives to find interesting stories from literature, cinema and every other sphere of culture, as we have done before. And this time we want you to be more involved. We know that India is seriously poor at archiving. Antiserious, since it hadn’t been explicitly said before, considers archiving as one of its missions. But due to limited human resource, linguistic skills and zero money, we can’t do it on our own. We are looking at you for this. Bring us the writings, video interviews, advertisements, everything that you think we need to preserve. If original isn’t in English, do not worry we are still very interested in it, but please accompany it with a translation. And, oh! This isn’t limited to India alone, but preferably we would like to limit this to lesser represented countries.

3. Our response time for the essays/poems/fiction pieces you submit is going to be anywhere between 10–12 weeks. However, we will be faster in responding to the blog entries. And please make sure you send all your entries to editorial@antiserious.com only. No sending the stories to personal email ids even if we are best friends forever.

4. There is another news we’d like to share with you. We will soon be starting a Poetry Translation project that will continue across issues. Because of personal limitations, at the moment we are accepting submissions in English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Assamese only. So translate an English poem in any one or more of the regional languages, or a poem from one of the regional languages in English. We are open to both the options. The translated works will be published in Roman script. We would like to begin with poets whose works are already in public domain, which would mostly mean that this is going to be a dead poets’ society. But that does not mean we are averse to publishing translations of contemporary writers. We only request that if you are translating a contemporary writer, you obtain a written permission.

And if anyone reading this is so in love with us that they would like to adopt us and pamper us — INVEST IN US — please get in touch!

Much love,
Editors