Lemniscate Updates: Book Clubs and Submission Prompts
Community in Book Clubs and Submission Prompts
Welcome to Lemniscate Newsletter! In this newsletter, we have a new blog post as well as a prompt to offer some inspiration if you’d like to send your own work to us.
Blog Post
Community in Book Clubs
Eileen L.
Community has never been something I thought of. As a 32-year-old I can look back and know I existed in communities but the language I used was schools, dance classes, volleyball teams, and jobs. When people said community around me I would brush them off or continue listening with tuned-out nodding. If people in my life would encourage me to seek out community I often grew uncomfortable around the idea of having to speak to strangers and begrudgingly participate in icebreakers. A cheesy scene of a utopia of neighbors coming together and sharing homegrown vegetables and speakers hosting mini Ted talks about activism is always what I imagined. It was based on no facts, just the image that came to mind.
Fast forward to the start of 2023, I decided I wanted to make more friends. I wanted to venture out into my new city, Tulsa which I hadn’t yet discovered. I also started to practice engaging online. Not just doom-scrolling on social media places like Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook but actually commenting my outlooks about topics or jumping in with a compliment on a unique outfit. While I got a little more confident I was still longing for some sort of an official group.
In an attempt to find books written by Autistic authors, I started searching words in the Instagram search bar and found @autisticbookclub . While I didn't see any books about Autism on their profile at first, I found re-posts of tweets about the Autistic experience. So, I hit follow and quickly forgot about it. Little did I know this page was for a book club that happened to be on a break.
When they started back up again, I journeyed over to Meetup…
Media Recommendations
Stim: An Autistic Anthology by Lizzie Huxley-Jones
Stim is a collection of short fiction, essays and art by autistic people. This anthology represents some of the incredible talent within the autistic community, mixing established voices with those yet to be discovered by the wider publishing industry. With work exploring motherhood, overstimulation, special interests, sex and identity, this book seeks to be an important introduction to autistic people, as well as an engaging literary collection.
Stim features work from Grace Au, Nell Brown, Mrs. Kerima Çevik, Agri Ismaïl, Helen Carmichael, Laura James, Katherine Kingsford, Rachael Lucas, Ashleigh J. Mills, Tristan Alice Nieto, Reese Piper, c. f. prior, Megan Rhiannon, Robert Shepherd, Waverly SM, gemma williams, Amelia Wells, and Tjallien de Witte.
Submissions Prompts
In order to inspire people to submit work for the newsletter we are going to be sharing both a visual and written prompt.
Visual prompt:
Written Prompt:
“They stepped outside and the lightning struck the ground right in front of them.”
If either one of these inspires you to write a poem, short story or create a piece of artwork please submit here: