E-mail for inquiries and submissions: Shauna Aura Knight ; please put “Immanion Press Leadership Anthology Submission” in your subject line.
Megalithica Books, an imprint of Immanion Press (Stafford, U.K./Portland, OR, U.S.A) is seeking submissions for Pagan Leadership: An anthology on Group Dynamics, Healthy Boundaries, and Community Activism
Deadline for submissions: September 1 2014.
The words “Pagan Leadership” are often met with scorn and tales of failed groups and so-called Witch Wars. And yet, as our communities grow and mature, we find ourselves in dire need of healthy, ethical leaders. Anyone who has been in a group that said, “Let’s just not have any leaders or power issues,” has seen what doesn’t work. But what does?
This anthology will explore leadership for real Pagans and real groups. We’re looking for essays and articles that detail leadership success stories, best practices, and ways you have worked through challenges and obstacles. Our specific focus is on techniques to help Pagans build healthier, stronger, and more sustainable groups and communities. We’d like to see a combination of hands-on how-to, personally-inspired, and academic pieces that will offer readers tools they can use in their own groups.
What resources do you have now that you wish you’d had when you stepped into leadership? What problems have you faced and overcome? How have you faced the unique difficulties of grassroots Pagan leadership? What are tools and techniques that have worked? Essays and articles should be 1500-4,000 words.
We’re also looking for brief (500-1000 words) personal stories of what we might call leadership disasters—community blow-ups that you’ve personally witnessed or even mistakes you’ve made as a leader. With few exceptions, these would be published anonymously (not naming names/locations) in order to illustrate, through the personal voice of storytelling, the need for leadership education through the power of storytelling. These stories do not need to be formally written; they should simply tell a story about problems you experienced that caused a group to blow up. Note: We prefer shorter pieces for this, but up to 2,000 words might work.
What we are not looking for:
We are not looking for spells or rituals. We’d also prefer to not see generalized advice, like “leaders should delegate,” but rather, “Here’s how I learned to delegate in my group” or “here’s how a team I was part of successfully handled delegation.”
Here are some suggested topics to give you an idea of the focus of this anthology:
- Planning a successful Pagan event, or running a successful coven or circle, or—how those involve different leadership processes
- Skills to build community from the ground up, and skills to sustain a community long-term
- Organizational leadership techniques
- Transformational leadership and servant leadership
- Experiences with Pagan unity councils or other collaborative work between groups
- Dealing with local Pagan politics, including dealing with difficult, mentally ill, or abusive local leaders
- Dealing with difficult and disruptive group members, spotting predatory practices, red flags
- Gossip, bickering, rumors, and triangulation, ego and egotism, conflict resolution and personality conflicts
- Communication skills and techniques
- Personal work and self transformation required to be a leader, boundaries, dealing with personal burnout
- Administrative aspects of leadership, leadership structures like bylaws, mission statements
- Handling money in your group
- Ethics of leadership
- Delegation and dealing with volunteers dropping the ball
- Keeping people motivated, empowering group members and new leaders, passing on the reigns of leadership
- Creating a safe space
- Different leadership models (consensus, hierarchy, rotating leadership, democracy)
- Facing a leadership disaster/crisis
Submission Deadline is ____. Articles should be 1500-4000 words, although if your work falls outside those limits, do submit it – we can discuss this during the editing process. Personal experience essays should be 300-2,000 words. Drop us an email if you are unsure whether your idea fits into the content. The sooner you start the communication process the better, as after the deadline we won’t be considering additional ideas.
Do write in your voice! If you’re academically inclined or trained, feel free to be as intelligent and technical as you like, and writing in the first person is fine as well. These drafts will be edited in a back-and-forth process with the editor. If your essay is not accepted for the anthology, we will tell you after the first round of edits.
Essay requirements:
- Citations for all quoted, paraphrased, or otherwise unoriginal material
- Bibliography of works cited
- Prefer the Modern Language Association (MLA) Style http://www.library.cornell.edu/resrch/citmanage/mla
- Send the file in RTF format
Compensation:
Accepted contributors will receive a free copy of the anthology when it is published and additional copies sold at 40% off the cover price to contributors. All contributors will be provided with a contract upon final acceptance of their essays.
Rights:
This anthology will take nonexclusive first world rights for 6 months.
Editors: The anthology will be edited by Shauna Aura Knight and Taylor Ellwood:
Shauna Aura Knight is an artist, author, community leader, presenter, and spiritual seeker who travels nationally speaking on the transformative arts of ritual, community leadership, and personal growth. She is the author of several books including The Leader Within and Ritual Facilitation. She’s a columnist on ritual techniques for Circle Magazine and writes frequent articles and blogs on the topic of Pagan leadership, and her writing also appears in several Pagan anthologies. You can find her site at: http://www.shaunaauraknight.com/books and her leadership blog at: http://shaunaaura.wordpress.com and her email address for this anthology is ShaunaAura@gmail.com
Taylor Ellwood is the author of Pop Culture Magick, Magical Identity, and other books on magic. He is also the managing non-fiction editor of Immanion Press. He can be found online at http://magicalexperiments.com
Immanion Press is a small independent press based in the United Kingdom. Founded by author Storm Constantine, it expanded into occult nonfiction in 2004 with the publication of Taylor Ellwood’s Pop Culture Magick. Today, Immanion’s nonfiction line, under the Megalithica Books imprint, has a growing reputation for edgy, experimental texts on primarily intermediate and advanced pagan and occult topics. Find out more at http://www.immanion-press.com.