Great Salt Lake Anthology

2024 Call for Submissions: Due June 30.

The SLCC Community Writing Center is part of the Great Salt Lake Collaborative (GSLC), a Solutions Journalism collaborative of 19 Utah organizations working together to share stories about Great Salt Lake and ways to protect our city’s dying namesake. For 2024, we are proud to announce a call for submissions for the "Lake as Legacy/Lake as Future" Community Anthology 2024.

We're especially interested in speculative fiction — written, visual, multimedia, performance — that responds to the themes of "lake as legacy" and/or "lake as future."

What is speculative fiction? There are debates about what this super genre encompasses. For the purposes of the 2024 Great Salt Lake Community Anthology, "speculative fiction" is an umbrella genre in which writers/creators speculate on big the "what if?" question about the past, present, and future. Speculative fiction includes science fiction, climate fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, utopian, and other forms of storytelling centered on that "what if?" question in ways that blend and blur reality with the not-yet-possible or with the entirely fantastical.

We will consider submissions outside of speculative fiction as long as they directly and meaningfully respond to the "lake as legacy" and "lake as future" themes.

Text-based submissions over 3,000 words that are accepted will be excerpted for the print edition. The entirety of the work will be published online.

This call is open to any writer, photographer, performing artist, and visual artist ages 15 and older.

NOTE: editors and designers will make small edits for clarity and design consistency.

Submissions must be submitted via Submittable no later than 11:59 p.m. on June 30, 2024.

2022 Anthology: Consecrate/Desecrate

The Great Salt Lake Collaborative is a Solutions Journalism collaborative of well more than a dozen Utah organizations working together to share stories about Great Salt Lake and ways to protect our city’s dying namesake. As part of the Collaborative's work, the SLCC Community Writing Center facilitated a call for submissions for the Great Salt Lake Community Anthology.

Writers of across a myriad of genres, photographers, and artists using all genres and mediums submitted their written, visual, and performative stories about the Great Salt Lake to the anthology. We were thrilled to receive well over 200 submissions from creators all over Utah and some outside of the state. The culmination of this effort is the Great Salt Lake Anthology, which we've titled "Consecrate/Desecrate."

To make something sacred is to bring it in to oneself and, in turn, to let yourself become a part of it. The stories, poems, pictures, and artwork contained here are a testament to that idea. They revere the Great Salt Lake for what it once was, and they decry what may happen to it in the future. Above all, they exemplify what the Great Salt Lake is: An inextricable part of this environment, of Utah, and of every one of us who lives here beside it. This anthology serves as a reminder that we do not exist separate from the natural world, we are a part of the natural world. To harm the lake is to harm ourselves, to become the agents of our own desecration. The Great Salt Lake’s salvation lies within our unity, our perseverance, and our ability to honor that which is as much a part of us as we are of it.

““I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.””

– excerpt from Boy Breaking Glass by Gwendolyn Brooks

“Gradually, the dust
becomes the rose light
of autumn.”

– excerpt from Consecration by Susan Stewart

The works on this page are a collection of multimedia, audio, and long-form stories about the Great Salt Lake that were submitted for publication in the anthology. This space on the GSL Collaborative's website functions as the digital publication of these dynamic works. Thank you to all of the writers and creators who trusted us with their works and for sharing their stories about the Lake in an effort to save and restore it.