Submissions Guidelines

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Format and Publication Schedule

After the third issue of Deep Times, we moved to a twice a year publication schedule and a web-based edition to make the articles more readable and accessible.  Currently, we plan to publish in March and September, although that can change due to the vicissitudes of life.

Submission Guidelines

Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects welcomes articles and interviews related to the Work That Reconnects (also called Active Hope in some parts of the world): its theory, applications, use with various populations, etc. We also accept poems,   articles, and artwork addressing one of the stages of the Spiral: gratitude, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new/ancient eyes, and going forth in service to life.  We welcome news from the Work That Reconnects Network, as well as reviews of books, music, and other resources. Our primary audience is facilitators of the Work, and we suggest that authors consider how their article can be used to support facilitators and the Work.

Topics may include:

  • gratitude for Earth and for the ecological/social justice movement and the Great Turning,
  • honoring our pain for the world, and the Great Unraveling,
  • Deep Time or the Fourth Time (past, present, and future as one),
  • systems thinking (thinking like an ecosystem),
  • Deep Ecology (the wisdom of honoring all life as sacred circle),
  • undoing oppression and racism; addressing “power over” and privilege,
  • paticca samuppada (mutual causality, dependent co-arising, or interbeing),
  • the shift in perception of flows instead of things,
  • our collective work to create new systems, especially those welcoming to all peoples and cultures,
  • preserving the good and holding actions to stop destruction,
  • how we clarify our roles as agents of the Great Turning towards a life sustaining and just culture, 
  • how the Work That Reconnects is related to other traditions and systems of thought, e.g. ecopsychology and indigenous wisdom, 
  • new and adapted practices for workshops, 
  • learnings and questions about facilitation, and
  • decolonizing the Work itself and other topics on the evolving edge of the Work.

We give preference to work submitted by practitioners of the Work That Reconnects, including writings by practitioners in their mother tongue with an English translation. We especially seek poems appropriate for use in workshops.

Length: for essays or interviews: 500 to 2000 words.

Submit at least three months prior to expected publication date by emailing an editable document to: deeptimes@workthatreconnects.org.  The editorial team will review your submission and decide whether it fits our criteria as well as the theme of the upcoming issue.  In some cases, we may suggest publishing your piece in a later issue that has a more closely related theme.

Format:

  • We only accept submissions in an editable format, this may include Word, Google-doc and other formats that are easy to share and edit . Please don’t send PDFs or link to websites.
  • Please use APA style guide for citations and references–not footnotes.  We have to enter footnotes manually.
  • Note on poetry submissions: Due to limitations of our current website formatting, we strongly prefer poetry without unusual spacing.  At least for now, we will favor poetry that is left- or center-justified, single-spaced with double spacing between stanzas, and without long lines that will word-wrap differently on different devices.

Upon acceptance:

  • One of our editors will communicate with you with requests for any changes or revisions needed.
  • Please send a 100-word bio and headshot (400 kb file) for our contributor information.
  • Please send an audio file of articles or poems, preferably in the author’s voice.  If that is not possible, we will find another reader to record the audio version.
  • Please send any images that could accompany your article or poem.
  • We are committed to making Deep Times journal accessible to visually-impaired people.  So we ask that you send a description of any artwork that we can include as a caption (to be read by screen reader programs).

Attention to the use of “we.”

All too often, writers make generalizations about what “we” experience, without defining who the “we” includes.  For example, someone might write about how “we are cut off from nature,” but this might not be true for many indigenous people.

That sentence could be reworded in one of these ways: “Many of us living in the Industrial Growth Society….” or “People who identify as white….”  or  other phrases that identify the group that “we” includes. 

Of course, there are uses of “we” that don’t fall into this category; for example: “we are all interconnected.”  That’s true of all humans–and all life!