Dear Reader,

We assume your motivation to be singular: money, no?  We don’t judge.  Times are tough, and you wish to render them a smidge easier with your talents.  More on all that cash prize business soon enough.  In the spirit of what follows, a bit of reading, for context.  Our hope is you come to see more in the project than fetching a payout.  

–

In some corners of the Internet it is said we all died in 2020—that we have been living in hell ever since.  (Perhaps you became acquainted with this theory after a late-night doomscroll dragged you to such a corner for a look.)  One notices the underpinnings of this thinking are varied, and that it is unclear to which degree subscribers regard this death as literal or symbolic.  However seldom a buy-in, any promotion of this particular existential chatter ought to leave the rest of us feeling uneasy.  Chunks of humanity are becoming unmoored from the most basic principle of cooperative function: we are alive, all of us, all together, and there is meaning to this.  

Though it is not uncommon to feel things have been “off” for some time now.  No need to dredge the comment section of a Facebook post or that of a backwater Reddit thread to verify this claim. A bit of time rooting around one’s network (as in the IRL version) reveals most—the neighborhood kook, the checkout guy at the grocery store, your mom—would agree.  There is a deep thirst for “normalcy” that purportedly no longer exists and might never again, if we are to trust “normalcy” ever existed in the first place.  Even so, perception is reality.  

Despite instinct to do so, pinning this sense on any particular event or year is a gross oversimplification.  The seismic activities of 2020 were not the isolated beginnings of anything, rather moments (albeit dizzyingly conspicuous ones) in an accelerating fissure of plates. How wide and far back this splitting extends is difficult to say.  Perhaps it’s turtles all the way down, back to when we banged rocks together and battled with oaken clubs, and to think otherwise is the hubris of those positioned at the unfurling tip of history. Be that as it may, the opaqueness of a point of origin should not discourage us from attempting to make some sense of it all.

This hunt discloses a sticky irony: Children of the digital age—or whatever we should call these years and those of us growing up alongside them—are conditioned to believe the answers to these questions and all others can be unearthed online.  At the very least, we are conditioned to wring the Internet rag first and foremost.  But if one suspects the Internet and its sundry media onslaught were a significant, if not the primary, source of malaise spawning from 2020, then expecting remedy from its clickbaity, tribal, ad-festooned, AI-drivelling annals is like hoping to kick black-tar heroin at a rehab that administers clean needles to patients with a hankering for one. 

Given the undeniable attractiveness of the proposition—one only need to reach into a pant pocket to cure all boredom; to quench any thirst of curiosity; to have any desire of the material world delivered to a doorstep within hours; to have an artificial mind take on the burden of thinking for you, writing for you, talking to you, and even loving you—it is unsurprising we became so glazed over by the convenience that no one bothered to notice the bad juju wafting in with it.  Then again, convenience is a top American virtue; it has been for some time now.  Our people were amply primed to snap up the digital equivalent to a Costco: all solutions to eons of human need and worry bundled into a one-stop package.  

In this haste for a state-of-the-art future, we handed over the tiller to a pack of scorned incels rebranded as “tech bros,” what with their compounding material successes and conspicuous interests in jiu jitsu and spear throwing.  With just a dash of cynicism, one views these men not as luminaries but as camouflaged misanthropes who, growing up, extracted so little value from the whimsies of a tangible world as to be more than willing to throw babies out with the bathwater. With this mindset they’ve approached the “problem” as if equipped to do so with a gigantic Etch-a-Sketch: shake up everything when it no longer pleases the beholder, erasing all traces of what was.  (These days, slick algorithms make up the spearhead of this overhaul, having snatched primacy from the very smartphone vessels that smuggled them into our homes beginning around 2012.)

In this, another irony: The deluge of “content” these algorithms deliver drives our minds not to a more enlightened place but into a more primitive one.  When genuine, productive tidbits are sandwiched as a matter of design between unyielding dollops of rage, fear, apathy, and condescension, the brain becomes possessed by its reptilian sector.  Fight or flight and the lesser-mentioned freeze, all from the safety of a couch cushion or bus seat.  This can’t be healthy.  That there is any surprise the hallmarks of an advanced humanity—which include reading-for-pleasure as a pastime of the masses—are deemed less worthy to survive the hologram melee is a wonder.  Some estimates show a forty percent drop in reading for pleasure rates across the last two decades; in 2023, just half of Americans read a single book.  

So if it appears to you intolerance is becoming chronic, you would be right.  Sitting down for a proper read promotes empathy; empathy is a conduit to developing perspective, which can yield nuance; nuance paves the way for compromise.  Is today’s ideological landscape not a textbook chicken-or-the-egg scenario?  Is a widening gap in core principles (AKA, the so-called politics of identity) the result of a decreasing prevalence of nuanced individuals?  Or is plummeting nuance the natural result of unending polemic thought leaders, politicos, spokespeople, anarchists, lobbyists, influencers, and consumer goods salespeople exploiting the very digital comms architecture that induced a snowballing departure from the base compounds of empathy in the first place?  

Our belief, the point of all this preamble, is simple: only print media affords a reader the space necessary to crystalize empathy without the interruption of peripheral media jamming its way into their corneas.  There will be those who disagree with our perspective, that a personal resolution to redistribute the balance of info gathering done online and info gathering done on paper is not equivalent to choking one’s appetite for broad, balanced awareness.  We are not advocating for ostriches here—this is a plea for change of method and pace.  Please, seek to know more about as much as one can, from as many voices possible. Only do so more slowly, more deliberately than one is accustomed to.  

In this, we’re rallying a modest offering to the philosophy: Anemone, a print-only review that seeks to platform the imperiled analog perspective.  We hope to pack it with gutsy creative nonfiction and incisive essay work; impactful original reporting; gripping short stories that hint at the pitfalls of today and poetry that teaches us how to live tomorrow; photography one can’t help but tack to a wall until the paper yellows.  We believe to reclaim some “normalcy,” to convince people we have yet to kick the bucket and are not yet living in hell, is to look back to the very best traditions of life before it was hijacked by screens. Traditions like reading words printed in ink on paper.  A simple antidote. Not the full fix, but a start.  

For now, this contest and the content of any subsequent Anemone editions will be limited to Montana residents past and present.  This, in addition to a more sensitive restriction: submissions must come from writers no older than 45 (the high-water mark of millennials).  We recognize some might find this ageist.  So be it.  This is not the privilege it might first appear.

Consider the world the young have been asked to inherit.  Things are in flux. Very much so.  This is not to discredit the wisdom of older voices chiming in, it is only to point out their opinings on this flux are fundamentally detached from experiencing the outcomes.  Older writers can add context, lived history, even advice, but never words capturing the acute personal agony of a future inhabiting a foreseeably wounded, unsafe planet. Yes, previous generations experienced jaw dropping technological advancement and social change, yet we’d wager societal upheaval as a result of new technology has never been more pronounced than it is today.  And yes, previous generations stared down the barrel of apocalypse in their time. But nukes can be negotiated out of, as opposed to, say, ecological collapse hurtling toward us like a runaway freight train.   

Then consider where most young voices end up relegated: self-published Medium and Substack blogs, the occasional long-form Twitter post, other ephemeral outlets in which an algorithm determines much of the eventual visibility and impact (put another way, worth). 

We want to carve exclusive space—print space—for the first generations to have plastic lodged into their genitals to no fault of their own.  We want to make tangible the perspective of human beings who have grown up with the chilling awareness they can be shot dead in a classroom or movie theater.  Room for people who have been robbed of orange egg yolks, and denied loving their buccal fat.  People who have only known fruit and vegetables sorted by laser guns and barcodes.  People who can’t accept when genocides are explained away by the geopolitics of long-dead men who would crap their pants at the sight of a Roomba vacuum.  People who find it intolerable that untold species are wiped from the face of The Earth to carve more space for condos, data centers, and cobalt mines.  For the first people needing to question if parenthood is an ethical pursuit on a planet that might one day struggle to produce potable water, let alone maintain the structural integrity of its ozone layer.  For the first people living in a world where all art, writing, and music is considered suspect, never without the possibility of having been produced by the unliving circuitry of a machine.   

We recognize it is ambitious to spawn such a project in wee Bozeman, Montana. Residents are more accustomed to print media revolving around some combination of wildlife photography, luxury real estate, guides to discovering the flowiest mountain biking trails and netting the chunkiest brown trout, celebrities undergoing cowboy metamorphoses after buying a “ranch.”  To many, success in breaking from these niches would appear unlikely.  And why should it not?  One could argue for a community its size Bozeman ranks among the most sheltered in the Lower 48; vast population gulfs to our east, west, north, south, combined with bottomless recreation offering reprieve from even the most intense unrest felt everywhere else (for those not outdoor-inclined, a wondrous binge drinking culture is available to fill the gap) makes it so. 

We hold faith this insulation hasn’t dulled the biting writing chops long boasted by Montana, that no matter how much psychic energy is spent praying for snow to ski, water to grow wheat and soybeans, resistance to lululemons and coworking spaces, our corner of the universe can still muster some of the most shrewd, dynamic insight out there (and with a dose of Montana attitude to boot).  

We are prepared to pay a grand-prize recipient $2,500 for their efforts in creative non-fiction or short fiction.  For the ambitious (given the time constraints), those willing to whip up a compelling original report can vie for the same prize pot.  An additional $500 is set aside for the top poet. Payment, on a per-word and per-poem basis, is available for select runners up. Photographers will also have some share of the paydirt.

Some quick directives: word counts should not exceed 5,000; use AI and you will be placed in a Full Nelson; win, lose, or even bother to submit, get off the Internet as much as your lifestyle can reasonably allow.  

Best of luck, 
The Editors

CLICK HERE FOR SUBMISSION GUIDELINES & SUBMISSION PORTAL