Deadline: 30 November 2026
Katitikan provides a platform for both Southern voices as traditionally understood in the scholarship, but also about scholarship that engages with the idea of the Philippines as a discourse on the South.
For the issue “Becoming,” Katitikan aims to explore the gentle, or un-gentle, gradual: our immediate world, and the human bodies that populate it interspersed with change—be it a progression, or transformation—a sudden burst of newness from the old. Cebuano literature at this present time is the epitome of this crux, torn between what philosophy says is “tradition and another beginning,” being populated with human bodies that establish and reinforce the conventions of how we speak about the Philippine south, but also with new voices who view and speak of the region in a different perspectives, words, and forms influenced heavily by technology and colonial mentality shaped by Western media.
Slow stories of growing up or coming-of-age in a complex socioeconomic and/or environmental reality are welcome. Narratives of reckoning, like transitions, migrations and transnationalism, and/or coming into an identity, the gaining of perspectives and advocacy through a baptism of fire that morphed and moulded a person are also considered. This issue also accepts works that delve into the evolution of technology parallel or juxtaposed with this process of growth and blooming. Religious concepts like transfigurations and ascensions may also be deconstructed and defamiliarized to create new multi-layered and/or revised meanings related to growth and emergence. Works may also play with the Marxist and post-Marxist aspects of “becoming”: who is allowed to become and who has the means to become, in terms of economic and social capacities. Reclamation may be seen as another form of “becoming,” taking back spaces and identities that may have been gentrified or co-opted back to its Filipino roots, with transformation apt for the 21st century and respectful of its source.
What To Submit
Contributors may submit the following:
- Poems of not more than 60 lines each
- Short stories ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 words
- Flash fiction pieces ranging from 100 to 1,000 words
- A chapter of a novel, including novel synopsis, ranging from 2000 to 4000 words
- Essay and creative nonfiction ranging from 2500 to 4000 words
- One-act play, screenplay or an excerpt from a full-length play ranging from 10 to 40 pages
- Critical essays about Philippine Literature and/or the Philippine South ranging from 1500-5000 words in MLA format.
Entries may be written in Filipino, Binisaya or in English. Works in other Philippine languages, with Filipino, Binisaya and/or English translation, are also welcome. Previously published writing is accepted, as long as you retain full publishing rights to the work. Exceptions may be made to the above guidelines with respect to both merit and the editorial board’s consideration. Please indicate publications and publication date where the work/s have appeared. The authors and artists will retain their full copyright ownership of their submissions, and no compensation will be provided.
How To Submit
Email your work in .doc or .docx format, with file name [Genre]_[Title]_[Author’s Last Name] (example: Poetry_Hello_Dela Cruz) to [email protected] together with the author’s name, and a short bionote.
About The Issue Editor
“Becoming” will be edited by Katitikan’s newest editor, Sievney Klyze G. Quidet. She is a faculty member of the University of San Carlos-North Campus, and a Masters in Literature student at the same university. The moderator of HULMA: the San Carlos School of Cebu Senior High School Creative Writing Club, and a proud member of Sunday Club and Women in Literary Arts (WILA), Sievney is active in the Cebuano literary community as the bridge between the new generation’s experimental idealism and the old school’s traditional grounded poetics. While trained in both poetry and creative nonfiction, Sievney now writes creative nonfiction, her essay, “Mga Pamaagi sa Online Dating” appears in the second volume of Libulan: Binisayang Antolohiya sa Katitikang Queer. Its English version, “The Hows of Online Dating,” will be in an upcoming issue of the UP Likhaan Journal for the 10 years of the Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio Writers’ Workshop. In culmination of her becoming within the Cebuano literary culture, Sievney’s solo chapbook “cherry-pickin’” is at Lost Books. You can find her on Instagram @theflipgothic.
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