Asymptote — Submit to our Special Feature: The Weather Has Changed (we welcome both English originals and translations into English)

Overview
Asymptote, a journal of world literature in translation, has issued a call for its special feature, "The Weather Has Changed." The feature will consider creative work of no more than 5,000 words by a single author, and—unusually for a translation-focused publication—will accept both works originally written in English and works translated into English. The submission window closes on December 2, 2026, and a $10 fee applies. The thematic premise is precise: the vocabulary of exceptional weather has become ordinary—record-breaking, unprecedented, once-in-a-century—and climate change, once discussed in the future tense, now constitutes the weather of the present. The editors invite work that addresses the crisis at every scale, from the planetary to the intimate, from spectacular disaster to almost imperceptible alteration. They also ask who is protected, who is exposed, and what happens to ideas of home and season as the world changes. Beyond subject matter, the call signals an interest in language itself: what climate change does to language, memory, and our sense of place. For translators, this is an opportunity to bring non-English reckonings with climate into English, and for writers working in English, to submit work that meets the feature's demand for formal and emotional precision. The journal's international scope and editorial seriousness make this a considered venue for writing that treats climate not as a theme to be announced but as a condition to be examined.