Last year, we announced the dates and details of the next three issues of Beatdom. (You can see that post here.) Today, I want to give a little more information specifically about Beatdom #25.
Next year, we will break with tradition by releasing Beatdom #25 in October rather than May. The reason is that we want it to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the 6 Gallery reading, one of the most important dates in Beat history (and, in our opinion, in American literature).
The theme of this next issue is San Francisco Renaissance. As such, we are looking for essays, interviews, reviews, photos, art, poems, and short stories connected to this subject. We devote most of our page space to essays and whilst we do publish a few pieces that are not devoted to the topic (if they are excellent and extremely important), we are much more likely to accept those that are on-topic. Please consider that when submitting and understand that we do reject a lot of poems and off-topic essays.
Several people have already promised the following:
- an essay on Philip Lamantia
- an essay on Madeline Gleason and the San Francisco Poetry Guild
- a detailed investigation of the 6 Gallery reading
- a comparison of the SF Renaissance and Beat writers’ poetry and politics
- part 2 of the Robert Duncan essay we ran in Beatdom #24
We are open to your ideas, but here are a few possibilities that we think would make excellent essays for this issue:
- other SF Renaissance writers
- women of the SF Renaissance
- the art scene / connections between visual and written art
- places of importance (The Place, 12 Adler, Vesuvio’s, etc)
- issues of race or sexuality
- studies of particular works related to the SF Renaissance
- little magazines and presses
- the SF Renaissance and environmentalism
- something about the related Berkeley Renaissance
If you have any questions, please get in touch. We will be reading submissions between now and July 2025. Our submission guidelines can be found here.
