Submission Guidelines

THIRD SHELF — ISSUE 03

Trickster

Call for Submissions | Thirdshelf Issue 3

A world lulled into indifference calls for strange medicine. For our third issue of Thirdshelf, we summon the Trickster: a timeline-jumper, a glitch in the code, and necessary chaos. The Trickster is not just an archetype, but a threshold, an opening where the psychic and the material blur, where the mirror turns back on itself and reality slips. The trickster in our eyes can also be an alchemist and a co-collaborator.

Carl Jung described archetypes as subliminal forces shaping our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. Yet one remains particularly exiled in contemporary culture: the Trickster. Irreverent, destabilising, uncontainable, the Trickster undermines belief systems, offering instead a primordial intelligence, dream logic, distortion, and metamorphosis. Without this energy, we are left stranded in a rigid order, unable to reimagine our inner lives or the outer experiences around us.

Across cosmologies, the Trickster surfaces in many skins: the Coyote and Raven of Indigenous traditions, both creators and saboteurs; the Middle Eastern jinn of smokeless fire, resistant to human control; Zār spirits in East Africa and the Middle East, who seize the body to unmask buried truths; the Japanese kitsune, fox-spirits who seduce, deceive, or guide through illusion. More than character or myth, the Trickster is a shifting intelligence: multi-species, multi-voiced, sometimes nothing but an inkling that something wants you to push through the shame.

We invite work that confidently leads into this instability: the hallucination that tells the prophecy, the joke that detonates, the gender that mutates mid-sentence, the grief that bends time. How does the Trickster shape-shift through neurodivergence, trauma, or political upheaval? What speculative or collective possibilities open when we stop behaving? What does it mean to be joyfully unstable, to contaminate rather than purify, to slip between timelines and come back altered?

This is not the language of selfhood, individual healing or self-correctness. It is the trick of water wearing stone. It is the spirit of smuggling love and mischief through the borders of the empire. We are seeking the wild wisdom in distortion, the liberation in trickery, the mirror that shows too much. Submissions may explore mental health disorders, nocturnal energies, altered states, and dissociation without the pressure to pathologise or resolve.

Send us your unclassifiable work- fiction, ritual, poem, essay, dream-logic, sound-text, or field notes from the impossible. Cross-genre, multi-species, fragmentary, ecstatic, resistant to form.

If you have only an abstract idea early on and would like support in determining the direction, get in touch with us.

Let the Trickster speak through you. Show us the threshold. Show us what needs to live on this side.

Format: Please submit your work as a Word document.

Length: Essays and stories should be between 1,000 and 3,500 words. Poetry can vary in length and can include multilingual structures. We would love it if you included some images or visual prompts.

Visual art and Multimedia: Submit high-resolution images or links to digital projects, together with a short descriptive text.

Sonic Recordings: Send us your project in MP3 and a short descriptive text.

Email: Please send your submissions to: thirdshelfjournal@gmail.com