Call for Submissions: Indelible Issue 11 — Chaos

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Chaos is often mistaken for disorder. Yet before every beginning, there is turbulence. Before the poem, the blank page. Before the image, the swirl of possibility. Before creation, the fertile confusion from which new worlds emerge.

For Issue 11, Indelible invites writers, artists, poets, photographers, researchers, and creative practitioners to explore the theme of Chaos.

Chaos may be cosmic or intimate. It may be the primordial void from which myths and universes arise, or the everyday disruption that unsettles our carefully constructed narratives. It is the storm before clarity, the crack through which transformation enters, the unpredictable encounter that changes everything.

Across philosophy, mythology, psychology, science, literature, and the arts, chaos has long occupied a paradoxical space. It is both destruction and creation, uncertainty and possibility, entropy and emergence. Jung recognised the creative potential of confronting the unknown. Contemporary science reveals complex patterns hidden within apparent disorder, or again, as Jung had said, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” Artists, poets, writers, and other creatives continue to discover that some truths can only be reached by venturing beyond certainty.

We invite submissions that engage with chaos in all its manifestations, including—but certainly not limited to—

• Chaos and creativity
• Order, disorder, and emergence
• Mythological chaos and creation stories
• The unconscious, dreams, and psychic upheaval
• Alchemy, transformation, and dissolution
• Ecological, political, and social instability
• Personal crisis and psychological transformation
• Fragmentation, ambiguity, and uncertainty
• Complexity theory and the science of chaos
• Noise, randomness, improvisation, and experimentation
• The sublime, the uncanny, and the liminal
• Creative processes that embrace unpredictability
• Beauty found within disorder

We welcome:

• Poetry
• Short fiction
• Creative nonfiction
• Hybrid and experimental writing
• Flash fiction
• Essays
• Visual art
• Photography
• Digital art
• Mixed-media work
• Other imaginative forms that resist easy categorisation

We are particularly interested in work that lingers within uncertainty rather than rushing towards resolution; work that embraces the fragment, the unexpected, the paradoxical, and the beautifully unfinished.

Perhaps chaos is not the opposite of meaning, but its birthplace.

We look forward to discovering what emerges!

Submissions deadline: September 15, 2026