SUBMISSIONS CALLOUT BMP 41 - Guest Editior Michalia Arathimos
Blackmail Press Special Issue Theme: Piercing the White Space

The theme ‘Piercing the White Space’ is open to interpretation. You might read this as an invitation to write about writing, about that white space that is literal and figurative that we find when we come to the page. Or you might write about the space we leave between stanzas, the pause in a sentence, or the breath between words. The white space might be the place you go after you die, or it might be the capitalist heteronormative paradigm we write into.

How I interpret the theme is that when we are writing as ethnic ‘others’ we write into a designated space. Spaces are prepared for us in writing culture in Aotearoa. Inherent in this preparation is a form of control: we are displayed as colourful ‘others’. Whiteness contains liminality; it contains a rainbow of colours. By writing into this white space, by consciously piercing it, we might truly voice ourselves.

SEND SUBMISSIONS TO: m.arathimos@gmail.com

Michalia Arathimos finished her PhD in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2013. She has published work in Best New Zealand Fiction, The Sovereignty of Words, Turbine, JAAM, Sport, and broadcast stories on National Radio. Her thesis compared media articles around writers Tusiata Avia, Karlo Mila, Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, and Kapka Kassabova with that around Pakeha-English writer Cliff Fell, interrogating the idea of awarded ‘otherness’. What she found was that writers like Mila and Avia are almost always considered ‘other’ in the mainstream press, while Cliff Fell, a migrant to Aotearoa, is claimed as ‘a New Zealander’. This white space does not reflect the true demographic make-up of Aotearoa; it does not reflect who ‘we’ really are.

SEND SUBMISSIONS TO: m.arathimos@gmail.com