SUBMISSIONS

Nuts and Bolts

Submissions for our first issue, to appear in late Spring 2025, will be accepted through January 20th, 2025.

Please send work to thepanaceareview@gmail.com.

Please include a cover letter in the body of your email providing context for the piece and explaining how the piece relates (or doesn’t relate) to your other work. Please attach the submission, preferably as a word doc. We are not opposed to previously published work.

We are agnostic towards form, genre, length, and any other limiting parameters.

Contributors receive two copies. Rights revert to authors.

Areas of Special Interest

LITERARY EPhemera

Foremost, we seek ephemera that you’ve written. This is defined broadly, but we focus especially on correspondence and notes. Send us emails from 2010 (especially if whoever you were emailing consents to have their replies printed, too). Send us your novel research notes, especially if you had a fling with the librarian. Send us lists, diaries, concepts of plans. We also seek essays on the experiences of archiving and collecting, as well as reviews of diaries and minor works. Everyone has ephemera. We bet some of yours is interesting.

Environmental Themes

For a journal named The Panacea Review to have no interest in ecology would be sacrilege towards a town whose defining institution is a marine lab. We look fondly on work that explores how humans relate to all the elements and species with which we share the planet. These need not be heavily researched non-fiction. Panacea is a muddy place—we encourage you to take us with you into the mud.

NORTH Florida, the South, and Tropical and Rural Spaces

Similarly, we will not forget region, and how it shapes social life. We heartily welcome submissions from anyone writing from anywhere, and are committed to reviewing the merit of all work equally, but we may be especially intrigued by submissions set in the Global South and US South.

Satire and Postmodernism

The review solicits wacky, wild, and free work, from the campy to the edgy. Work inspired by the ambitions of 60s-and-70s-style postmodernism is especially welcome. Perhaps you are noticing a trend—postmodernism, ecology, and ephemera are all unruly. We savor unwieldy forms and vivacious prose.

Cross-genre Art

We have an attraction towards artists working in a different genre than the one in which they are most known, or practice most often. If you write historical nonfiction, send us your folk song lyrics! This dabbling is at the heart of ephemera. We want art that, when it was first made, may not have realized it was art at all.

Documentary Work

We welcome documentary work broadly, including interviews, diaries, ethnographic and natural science field notes, and any observation-based work. Photographic work is welcome (as well as drawings, paintings, and visual art), but for now will be printed in black and white. You need not analyze what you are documenting—sometimes documentation alone is of sufficient interest.

Please send work to thepanaceareview@gmail.com!

A PRINT JOURNAL WITH a Soft Spot

for Archiving and Hiding Easter Eggs

We are a print journal not only due to the taste for holding a volume in hand, but because of our preference for paper as an archival medium. We do not yet know for certain if paper is a more durable archival medium than digital files. Regardless, paper provides other unique pleasures.

Chief among them is the serendipity with which old books circulate through society. As a physical presence that captures the eye, they must be kept, thrown out, gifted, or sold—most will be lost with time, but who knows where some may pop up. Not all used bookstores even carry old literary magazines—they are often thrown out—but some, like Westsider Books on the Upper West Side, still have a dedicated shelf for old literary journals. It is a great pleasure, in all the work lost to time, to stumble upon a name you know and love, tucked away, or else a name you’ve never heard but decide everyone should know. To open an issue of Dennis Coooper’s Little Caesar and find the work of David Wojnarowicz, is something like an archaeological joy. One has the benefit of seeing the work in context. The physical object, its wear and tear, also engages our body and connects us in a tactile way with the past.

The Panacea Review exists, in part, with this hope of communicating with quiet surprise across time. We hope that in some store a century from now carrying those charmed and obsolete objects, paper books, someone diving deep into the archives of generations gone by will find a copy of The Panacea Review. This is a strange, and perhaps even pitiable goal, to not seek contemporary relevance but instead, the most distant and quiet splash, but it is inspired by that great trick of artists for centuries: the easter egg. The hidden portrait. The stashed letter.

Salvador Dalí, who paved the way for performance artists and multi-genre work—as a painter, sculptor, writer, photographer, performer, jewelry designer, set designer, fashion designer, librettist, with the greatest collection of his work gazing across the Gulf of Mexico from St. Pete to Panacea—was a great fan of such easter eggs. He collaborated far and wide, leaving more of a trail than any one scholar could hope to follow. A painting he made on newsprint for a scouting magazine is in a location unknown. His 1968 interview with TV Guide hints at a future of artificial intelligence and virtual reality—not the average TV Guide interview. He left things in unexpected places, dabbled in unexpected genres, and his body of work is unfathomably vast. He wanted some of his work to be forgotten only so that it could be rediscovered—we have every reason to believe some of his paintings found at thrift stores in Spain were lost in stacks on purpose—he even misdated one from before he was born, to hide its true identity.

What is desirable about the tucked-away project? Ephemera is almost a form of performance art, capable of creating the most profound experience for the discoverers, for those who one day unearth what is buried. There is an advantage, in a small outsider journal, of not being concerned with a present-day audience and with market dynamics. The art can be what it wants to be.