Wailing & Gnashing is a new poetry journal for outsiders. They are always open, accept reprints, and while standard response time in the future will be around three months, you can expect much faster response times for their first upcoming issue. Read more about why they created the journal and what they are up in the interview below with founders and editors Chris Atkin and Andrew Earley below.  

HOPKINSON: Tell me a little bit about Wailing and Gnashing. 

ATKIN/EARLEY: Wailing and Gnashing was born from Utah’s underground art scene, and we wanted a name that reflected both our origin story as an artistic community, and our collective artistic philosophy. The phrase “Wailing and gnashing of teeth” was often used in biblical parables to describe the cast outs and others deemed unworthy of the kingdom of God, which felt especially appropriate for a magazine run by outsider artists in a largely conservative religious community. While poetry is practiced by many as a high and rigid artform, every poet started as a lost soul wailing in the street begging to be seen, or as a nervous outsider grinding their words between their teeth for fear of letting them loose in front of an unreceptive audience, we want to be a place that platforms outsider artists, and everyone else too. 

HOPKINSON: How/why was Wailing and Gnashing originally started? 

ATKIN/EARLEY: You know how inevitably every friend group shares a drunken moment where everyone looks at each other through half lidded eyes and exclaims,” Dude, we should start a band!!!” That’s essentially how Wailing and Gnashing came to be (so long as you shave off all the hours we spent developing our website and nitpicking submission guidelines and researching how to get registered on Duotrope and trying to overcome overwhelming waves of imposter syndrome).

But really, we both are products of Utah’s spoken word/ slam poetry scene, and we’ve seen lots of different kinds of poets on our stage. We’ve held space for young high school poets, viral slam poets like Rudy Francisco and Sabrina Benaim, our state’s poet laureate, Lisa Bickmore, and professors of poetry from local universities. We’ve watched all those styles collide in a single place, and we’ve seen them harmonize, when there are many who would argue such a wide breadth of styles should not be able to coexist. We wanted to create a space where work from all sides of the poetic and literary spectrum could share pages together, to rage, rejoice, reflect, and resonate. 

HOPKINSON: Who is your target reader audience? 

ATKIN/EARLEY: Ideally, everyone! In poetry slam (we’ll talk about slam a lot ok, it’s who we are!) judges are selected randomly from the audience, always prioritizing first time attendees and individuals with little to no poetic background. The idea is that it encourages poets to create accessible work that is easy to connect with after a single listen, but we’ve found that the audience appreciates the complex literary work that crosses the stage every bit as much as they do classic spoken word poems. What we’re saying is, all poetry is for everyone. Nobody dislikes poetry, they just haven’t found the right poem, and Wailing and Gnashing aims to be the place where anyone can find the poem for them. 

HOPKINSON: What type of work are you looking for? 

ATKIN/EARLEY: We’ve divided the poetry world into two general categories and they’re wide open ones. 

Wailers are raw, unfiltered, emotionally loaded poems that are equal parts deep dive soul cleanse and violent screams straight to the heart of the void. We’re looking for unrefined, powerful pieces, the kinds that leave the readers and the writers different people after the experience. 

Gnashers are the diamonds. The works of heat and pressure that you eventually peel the layers off piece by piece and pull out your masterpieces. They’re the works you bring to all your editor friends and tweak and tinker until they’re perfect. They are refined, they’re your babies, they’re the agonized over pieces that kept you up all night analyzing the amount of white space and line breaks.

But outside of that, we just want good, quality poems that we’re proud to share the page with. We want a journal for all the friends we’ve made through the years, and poems that are going to get them, and new poets excited about writing, so we can make even more. 

HOPKINSON: What do you wish you’d see submitted, but rarely comes in? 

ATKIN/EARLEY: We’re brand new at this, which seems like it would make this a tough question, but I think it’s probably the easiest one of this interview. The poem that we wish we saw more was the one that you are hesitating on. The one you’re questioning, trying to decide if it’s finished, or good enough, or if it’s even something that you want to see up on the page. We want to be the place where you are throwing the big question marks at the walls to see what sticks, because that has been the hardest part of poetry for us. We know what it feels like to wonder if you should put yourself out there… and we want to be the place where you KNOW you can shoot your shot, and even if you’re not published, you’ll be treated with respect and appreciation for the honor of trusting us with your art. 

HOPKINSON: What are some of your favorite Wailing and Gnashings/journals?

ATKIN/EARLEY: One of my favorite spoken word poems of all time, and an awesome example of what I’d consider a “Wailer” is Six Funerals by Eric Sirota. You can watch it here via youtube. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere in print, but if you like what you hear you should definitely check out Eric’s book The Rent Eats First, or Rota, his musical project available on Soundcloud and Spotify.

A really great poem I’d throw in the Gnasher category would be Mindy Nettiffee’s, The Year You Thought You Were Dying, which you can find on her website and in Sleepyhead Assassins from Moon Light Press.

Some of my favorite journals include The Lascaux Review, a journal dedicated to platforming accessible poetry for everyone, Brawl Lit, another fledgling journal run by the incredibly talented duo of Taylor Franson-Thiel and Martheus Perkins, and Punk Noir Magazine, which is just very inline with our grassroots, hardboiled approach to art and poetry. 

HOPKINSON: What is your favorite part of being on staff with Wailing and Gnashing?

EARLEY: In my high school creative writing class with my incredible teacher (shout out Mike Kasserman) I fell in love with the process of critiquing and refining creative works. I love the ability to give an outside perspective to poets who are giving us a piece of their souls with each word, and hopefully hold up a mirror to what they’re doing and help challenge them to think about each piece critically and deliberately. 

ATKIN: In my professional life I’m a high school English teacher, and because of that I really love the opportunity to help others grow and develop new voices. Working with Wailing and Gnashing gives me the chance to do that with a whole new group of eager artists, and offers me the chance to help platform new voices too. Everyone loves being the first person in their friend group to find that up and coming musician or band, and the work I do here scratches that part of my brain in a really fun way. 

HOPKINSON: Where can we send submissions? 

ATKIN/EARLEY: There is a submission form on the footer of each page of the journal, along with guidelines for how best to submit!

HOPKINSON: If someone has a question, how can they contact you? 

ATKIN/EARLEY: WailingandGnashing@aamputah.org for any questions, or if you happen to be a Utah native–or just in town on the last Monday of the month–you can almost always catch us at Salt City Slam, or Saturday mornings hosting a poetry brunch at The Beehive, we’d love to connect either way!

• • SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Always Open
  • THEME(S): Anything and everything, but we have special love for anything raw and visceral, anything and about finding your voice, community, or self. Anything that speaks truth to power. You know, Punk Rock shit. 
  • FORMAT: Online now, hopefully print to come
  • SUBMISSION FEE: Submitting to Wailing and Gnashing is, and will always be, free. We do appreciate donations, which can be venmo’d to @aamputah with the subject line “W&G Donation.”
  • PAYMENT: None
  • AVERAGE RESPONSE TIME: 3 months, but right now you can expect a much faster turnover. It’s the benefit of getting in on the ground floor!
  • SUBMISSION METHOD: Online submission via form available at wailingandgnashing.com 
  • SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS: Yes
  • REPRINTS: We do accept work previously published in other journals so long as you maintain the rights to your work.
  • FORMS: Poetry
  • SOCIAL MEDIA: Instagram

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