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With the intent of providing continued intelligent and entertaining content in the PopMatters’ Columns section, we are looking to broaden our staff of columnists and the voice of our writers’ community. We’re particularly interested in writers who live and work outside of the US, but that is not a deciding factor; in all cases, no matter the writer’s locale, we’re looking for those who can approach an array of cultural subject matter from their patch of the world with an international sensibility; that is, contextualize the local with an awareness of its place, historical and current, in the broader world.
Qualified writers are already readers of PopMatters (as but one vital supplement in their varied intellectual diet). They are familiar with the work of our current columnists, as well as other areas of the magazine, and they have a solid sense of what we’re looking for in content and caliber in these essays. We deliberately use the terms “essays” and “columns” interchangeably; as pieces are broad in scope yet grounded in real-world examples, and they are tied to regular deadlines and an established identity (and therein lay the “columnist” element). With these expectations in mind, we have monthly and every-other-month column slots available. Suitable writers are dedicated to regular deadlines and enjoy participating in friendly, ongoing communications with their editor.
PopMatters seeks feature essays (min. 1,200 words - no max. limit) arguing the pros and cons of anachronism in film, literature, video games, music and other products of pop culture.
Pitch Deadline: 15 June 2013
Final Essays Deadline: 31 July 2013
Contact: C.E. McAuley and Sarah Zupko
Email: mcauley at popmatters dot com - and - editor at popmatters dot com
Although his first feature film, Citizen Kane, continues to be regarded by the high guard as one of the finest films ever made, Welles spent the rest of his life producing pictures that would either be widely derided or entirely neglected, if he was even able to complete them. Reduced in his twilight years to acting in wine adverts and second-rate blockbusters in order to personally bankroll projects no real producers would, Welles was always working, even at the very end of his life, on films every bit as potent and radical as the debut that eclipsed his career.
There’s an age old maxim that goes a little something like this: “you can pick your friends…you can’t pick your family” - and while that sentiment is indeed accurate, it’s still a bit specious. As a matter of fact, you can make a conscious decision to leave your legally linked biological others, and the only repercussion may be an innate sense of sadness (unless you really, really hate them) and the occasional odd look from those who don’t understand such distance. There’s also the instance where you “run out for cigarettes” and recreate a new communal brood out of the remnants of such an unexpected “break-up.” We ‘step’ through life like this all the time. So, in truth, you can pick your family—not in the literal sense (unless you have some sort of cosmic control on procreation)—but in the more flawed, figurative sense.
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