Projects

Spring 2025: Fantasy Dictionary

We invite you to contribute to a dictionary of words that don’t exist – but should!

All submissions for the Spring 2025 Fantasy Dictionary Contest
are eligible for publication in a Special Issue Fantasy Dictionary
if approved by the Editorial Board.
For more information, visit Contests.

Submissions are currently open and close on April 15th.

Fall 2024: The Unending Line

What can be prose, poetry, and art all at once? An unending line! 

Ribbon wrapped around a tree with the words: I pillage my poetic exploits in search of a mirage.
Ribbon wrapped around a tree with the words: resin steel brass tungsten carbide
Ribbon wrapped around a tree with the words: It's all about time, all about time It's time time, in no time. 12/9/14
Ribbon wrapped around a tree with the words: The hour is noon; the day is bright - The glass tower is a geyser frozen in height Reaches aloft as if to puncture the sky Thereon the firmament's eye is wrathfully drawn.
Ribbon wrapped around a tree with the words: [.I PROMISE….]
Ribbon wrapped around a tree with the words: the New Sentence, felicitous: the followthrough, a aline aligned

At Melange’s inaugural Open House on Dec. 9th, 2024, attendees wrote poetry on an enormous strip of paper held together by ribbons. If folded to fit the normal dimensions of a page, the ribbon would look like prose. But in its expanded form it is also a line, both artistically and poetically. 

The Unending Line, to use the words of Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. Some contributors wrote multi-line poems on a single section of the ribbon, some contained their work in colorful parentheses, some experimented with form by adding thumb tacks, and some played with nonverbal signs like arrows. The styles varied widely, from Romantic couplets with stunning imagery to modern minimalist distillations of meaning into a few potent words. Every entry is thought provoking in a highly unique way. 

We invite you to view our gallery of photos, in which the Unending Line winds its way around the branches of a tree near Jacques Lipchitz’s Song of the Vowels.