PodCastle is incredibly excited to announce our call for Indigenous Magic stories of Global homegrown mythologies and legends. We want stories that center Black, Brown, and Indigenous cultures, histories, belief systems, philosophies, and perspectives. These are the stories of fireside tellings that are tied to the land on which they are written, the stories that reflect our cultural and historical trajectories in the wivestales and gossip on the tongues of our mothers and grandmothers.

While our general guideline of receiving stories primarily in English still applies, we especially encourage stories that incorporate more than one language or dialect, stories that offer alternative structures to the expected linear standardized arc, and stories that offer a fresh take or new perspective on a history that has not been considered universal.

This is an opportunity to draw on the softly surreal and the deeply fantastical in oral histories that have been passed down.

It is important that these stories are told by the people they belong to. We respect the traditions they are drawn from and honour the need to make space for marginalized voices to tell their version of any given story. We welcome authors who are writing from indigenous perspectives that are within their realm of experience and personal history. If you’ve written a story about a culture that is not your own, please refrain from submitting it to this particular call.

We’re a fantasy publication, so all stories must have a fantasy element that’s crucial to the tale, though it can be subtle. We are unable to consider science fiction or straight-up horror, though dark fantasy is more than welcome. We will consider both originals and reprints for this call, paying our standard rate of 8 cents per word for originals and $100 for reprints. We’re looking for stories between 2,000-6,000 words, though we will consider up to 7,000 words for reprints. These upper limits are strict: unfortunately we cannot consider reprints above 7,000 words or originals above 6,000 for this submissions call.

We’ll be open to Indigenous Magic submissions for the month of July 2022. Please submit through our Moksha portal. Our standard guidelines apply to anything we haven’t specified here.

We can’t wait to see your stories!

~Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Eleanor R. Wood, PodCastle Co-Editors

2021 was quite the year here at the Flying Castle. We published fifteen original stories and thirty-one new reprints; we were nominated for Hugo, British Fantasy, Ignyte, and Aurora awards; and we bid farewell to former Co-Editors Jen R. Albert and Cherae Clark, as well as to Assistant Editor and Host Summer Fletcher at the end of the year. Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Eleanor R. Wood took over as Co-Editors, and we’re starting 2022 with a whole new masthead, gazing at the glorious horizons before us, and deeply excited about all the wonderful stories we’re planning to bring you this year.

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The 2021 British Fantasy Award shortlist has been announced, and we’re honoured to have been nominated once again in the Best Audio category! Our tentacled sister, PseudoPod, has also been nominated again in this category, so we’re in the very best company.

As if that wasn’t enough lovely news, one of our stories has also been nominated for Best Short Fiction. We’re delighted that “8-Bit Free Will”, by John Wiswell (PodCastle 654), is up for the award, and we’ll be on tenterhooks for John as well as ourselves.

And yet more news! Escape Artists’ Head Honcho Alasdair Stuart is also up for Best Nonfiction for his weekly pop culture newsletter, The Full Lid. Cake and balloons for everyone!

Winners will be announced at FantasyCon, which takes place this year on September 24th – 26th in Birmingham, UK.

Please join us in congratulating PseudoPod, John, Alasdair, and all the other nominees. Huge thanks from us here at the Flying Castle to all our listeners, our narrators, and our wonderful authors, and to our superb editorial team for all their hard work.

Hello, readers and listeners, lovely visitors to the castle!

We have some bittersweet news to announce. After an enjoyable tenure, Jen Albert and Cherae Clark are leaving their positions as co-editors of PodCastle. There are, simply put, not enough hours in the day, and they both need to focus on their rapidly expanding careers. Jen will be pursuing book editing and acquisitions at ECW Press, while Cherae focuses on writing (including the sequel to The Unbroken).

They are thrilled, however, to leave the keys to the castle in the capable hands of Eleanor R. Wood and Shingai Njeri Kagunda. We’ll let them introduce themselves to you at length a little later on, but briefly:

Eleanor has been working with PodCastle as an associate editor and copyeditor at PodCastle for over four years and is an excellent writer as well. Her stories have appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, Diabolical Plots, PodCastle, Nature: Futures, The Best of British Fantasy 2019, and various anthologies, among other places.

Shingai is a Kenyan writer of flash, short fiction, novel, and poetry who’s finishing her MFA at Brown University. During the pandemic, she co-founded Voodoonauts, a empowerment and educational organization constructed to uplift Afrofuturist Writers. Her story in Fantasy Magazine, “And This Is How to Stay Alive,” will reprint in 3 best-of anthologies this fall as well as sprawl into the novella, & This Is How to Stay Alive, at Neon Hemlock.

The upcoming stories through the rest of the year will likely be some combination of stories that Jen and Cherae picked out from the submissions periods of 2020, and the stories that Eleanor and Shingai pick out from this year. And in the future, who knows? Jen and Cherae may show up for a narration or to guest host an episode or two.

So, in all honesty, this is probably not the last time that you’ll hear from either Jen or Cherae–once you’re part of the Escape Artists family, you’re kinda stuck. With that, please give a warm welcome to Eleanor and Shingai! We all look forward to how their vision shapes the future of PodCastle.

From Jen and Cherae–thank you all for being a part of our lives for the last several (Jen)/few (Cherae) years. We’ve loved reading your stories and your reactions to the stories we aired. Thank you also for the confidence you’ve placed in us as you nominated and voted for us in the Hugos, the Ignytes, the British Fantasy Award, and more.