What does explosive violence leave behind? In our first issue, writers from Lebanon, Laos, Sudan, and Iraq give shape to what most accounts leave formless.
Each issue is built around a single word — a theme that functions as an open invitation. Writers, farmers, survivors, artists and journalists interpret it freely.
The common thread is proximity to experience. We publish the person who lived it alongside the person who studied it.
Read our manifesto"A theme like Land can yield a legal essay on indigenous title, a poem about soil, a photo essay on dispossession, and a piece of flash fiction — all in the same issue."
From the editorial manifestoA quarterly journal of testimony, journalism, poetry, and fiction. No algorithm. No noise. Four issues a year, built around a single theme.
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A quarterly journal built around a single rotating theme each issue. The theme is an invitation, not a brief. What you make of it is entirely your own.
Elsewhere Quarterly exists because the voices with the most direct relationship to an experience are rarely the ones doing the publishing. A farmer who watched a bomb destroy his field knows something that no analyst, no journalist parachuted in for a week, and no academic writing from a university in another continent can replicate.
"The standard is proximity to experience — direct, accountable, earned. A writer from Ohio who survived a bombing has as much right to speak on that theme as anyone."
We do not restrict by geography. We restrict by quality of witness. We pay our writers. We edit in conversation, not over them. We protect their sources. We give contributors five subscriptions to share with their communities, because we believe the people we write about should be able to read what we publish about them.
Each issue word is an open prompt. Contributors interpret it in any direction. The theme creates coherence — it does not impose it.
The editorial standard is the writer's relationship to their subject — direct, accountable, earned. We publish the person who lived it alongside the person who studied it.
We edit closely and honestly. Nothing is changed without the contributor's agreement. The final text belongs to both of us.
We pay €200 per published piece from Issue 1. This is a statement about the value of the work, not generosity.
Anonymous sources remain anonymous. We follow the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma guidelines.
Geographic pricing, free access for low-income readers, and five complimentary subscriptions per contributor.
Canyon Hohenstein is a writer and journalist based in Madrid, Spain, originally from Belgrade, Montana. His book Who Tames the Flames? documents the lives of prisoners who fight wildfires — a project built on the same values as Elsewhere Quarterly: sourcing voices from outside mainstream attention, building trust with subjects in difficult circumstances, and producing long-form narrative from firsthand testimony.
He conducted the last recorded interview with Patrick Hemingway. His work has appeared in Montana Quarterly, Mountain Outlaw, Wildfire Today, and other publications.
For submissions, enquiries, institutional subscriptions, or press.
editor@elsewherequarterly.com
Every issue of Elsewhere Quarterly. One theme per issue. Four times a year.
What does explosive violence leave behind? Six writers from Lebanon, Sudan, Laos, Iraq, Egypt, and Montana respond to a single word.
Between issues, we sit down with the writers, journalists, and artists who contribute to Elsewhere Quarterly. Eight to ten questions. The conversation as it happened.
A conversation with Fatima Khalil
Fatima Khalil grew up in southern Lebanon during a decade of recurring bombardment. Her essay for Issue 1, The Sound Before the Sound, reconstructs her childhood from fragments — a doorframe, a smell, a particular quality of silence. We spoke about writing from inside catastrophe, the limits of language, and why she mistrusts the word survivor.
"The house didn't disappear. It became a different kind of presence. You learn to live alongside absence the way you learn to live alongside a scar."
Fatima Khalil — First Person, Issue 1A conversation with Fatima Khalil
Fatima Khalil. Beirut, Lebanon, 2025.
Fatima Khalil grew up in southern Lebanon during a decade of recurring bombardment. Her essay for Issue 1, The Sound Before the Sound, reconstructs her childhood from fragments — a doorframe, a smell, a particular quality of silence that preceded destruction. We spoke by video call over two sessions. This is an edited transcript.
Your essay opens with a sound rather than an image. Was that a deliberate choice from the beginning, or did it emerge in revision?
It emerged from the failure of the image. I tried many times to begin with what I saw and it always felt like a photograph of someone else's memory. But the sound was still inside me in a way the images were not. It lives in the body differently.
There is also something I wanted to say about anticipation. The sound before the sound — the particular quality of silence, the way the air changed — was in some ways more defining than the explosion itself. We learned to read that silence. It educated us.
"The house didn't disappear. It became a different kind of presence. You learn to live alongside absence the way you learn to live alongside a scar."
You use the word "rubble" only once in the piece, very late. Why the restraint around that word?
Because rubble is what other people call it. For us it was still the house. Still the kitchen. Still the room where I slept. To use rubble would have been to accept someone else's language, someone else's timeline — in which the destruction was already complete, already categorised, already past.
I wanted to stay in the before. In the tense where the house was still a house.
You told me you mistrust the word "survivor." Can you say more about that?
It places you in a category defined entirely by what happened to you. It makes the event the primary fact of your identity. And it creates a binary — survivor and non-survivor — as if the alternative were simply death. There is an enormous territory between those two positions that the word erases.
What did you want readers outside Lebanon to understand that they typically don't?
That normalcy is not the opposite of catastrophe. That people cook and argue and fall in love and get bored inside catastrophe. When you imagine us as only suffering, you make us into something less than human. You make the catastrophe our entire substance. And then you can feel sad about it for a moment and move on.
I wanted to make it harder to move on.
Was there anything you chose not to include?
Almost everything. There is a great deal that I know but that does not belong in writing yet, or perhaps ever. I am wary of the assumption that all experience should be made into language.
What are you working on now?
A longer piece about return — about going back to a place that no longer contains what you went back for. It will probably take another three years.
What are you reading?
Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, again. Antoine Cassar's poetry. And a very old cookbook my grandmother left behind, which I am reading as literature.
Fatima Khalil is a writer and translator based in Beirut. The Sound Before the Sound is her first publication in an English-language literary journal.
Read her piece in
Issue 1 — BombsFour issues a year, built around a single theme. No algorithm. No noise. Just writing from people closest to the story.
We believe writing about the world should be readable by the world. Every Supporter subscription funds two Solidarity subscriptions. If you cannot afford a subscription, you can have one — no questions asked.
We don't ask for proof of anything. If the standard price is genuinely a barrier — you're a student, you're based in a low-income country — apply for free access. We will say yes.
We also offer geographic pricing. Readers in many lower-income countries are charged automatically at a rate that reflects local purchasing power.
Apply for free accessWe are looking for writing that comes from proximity. From inside an experience, not above it.
What does explosive violence leave behind? In the body, in the land, in language, in memory. We are not looking for analysis from a distance. We are looking for writing from inside the experience.
Every published piece receives a fee paid within 30 days of publication. You retain full copyright.
We publish six to eight pieces per issue across a range of forms. The theme is an invitation — what you make of it is yours.
Personal, argumentative, lyric. Any approach, as long as the thinking is yours.
On-the-ground journalism. Sources, scenes, narrative. Fact-checked.
First-person account. Lightly edited with your consent. The voice is primary.
Short stories with a direct relationship to the theme.
Sequences welcome. Formal intention and grounded language.
Images with captions and a short written introduction.
We read everything we receive and respond to every submission — usually within six weeks. We do not charge submission fees.
Your work must be original and previously unpublished in English, including on personal blogs or social media in substantial excerpts. We accept simultaneous submissions but ask that you notify us immediately if accepted elsewhere.
If your piece involves individuals who wish to remain anonymous, or testimony from people in vulnerable situations, please note this in your cover letter. We follow the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma guidelines.