Open Call: Impenetrability as a Generative Force

What would you do if you encountered a door and didn’t own the key? Or if you met someone and didn’t speak the same language? Or if you read a book and it felt inscrutable? You could try to break the barrier one way or another. You could get angry because you couldn’t pass through. Or you could stare at the barrier and examine it to see what it can tell you. We have been trained to get closer, to go deeper, to reach a point. But what if we celebrate impenetrability? What if we champion those things that cannot be entered, pierced, or understood? What if we treat them as something worth protecting?

For this open call, I would like to see prose that explores impenetrability as a generative force, as a quality that unlocks unexpected doors. I’m not interested in impenetrability as a stylistic choice that makes a text illegible or snobbishly abstruse. I want to read authors who understand impenetrability as a rare opportunity, as a channel toward clarity. I invite you to redefine our relationship with that concept, to expand its meanings in playful, surprising ways. Here are a few examples:

— Regarding his creative process, Philip Guston once wrote, “These few people who are the closest to me and think they know me well, they don’t know me at all. And that became the most important thing, that the people closest to you don’t really know you.”

— Édouard Glissant said, “A person has the right to be opaque. That doesn’t stop me from liking a person. A racist is someone who refuses what he doesn’t understand. I can accept what I don’t understand.”

— In the foreword to his novel L’Écume des jours (translated into English as both Froth on the Daydream and Mood Indigo), Boris Vian provocatively stated that “the essential thing in life is to judge everything a priori.” When you judge something a priori, you refuse logical reasoning; you decide not to cross an intellectual threshold.

— In physics, impenetrability means that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. This makes me think of the Swedish composer Lisa Streich, who collects unusual chords. When two or more people sing the same chord in slightly different intonations, they are circumventing something impenetrable—a complete encounter, a perfect communion. Perhaps being slightly out of tune (in music, in life) is a refusal to penetrate an imagined center.

— One of my favorite idioms comes from the Catalan language. In Catalan, when people say they “have drunk oil,” they mean they are doomed. This idiom comes from a brutal practice in which victims were forced to drink boiling oil as a form of execution.

Eligibility: Only previously unpublished works of fiction or nonfiction are eligible. Only writers who have not yet published or been contracted to write a book-length work with a U.S. publisher are eligible. Writers who have self-published, published an academic text, published a book with a publisher outside the U.S., or translated another writer’s work are eligible to apply. International applicants are encouraged to apply. Work that incorporates multiple languages is eligible, so long as the primary language is English. Translations are welcome, but please note it is the translator’s responsibility to secure rights to the work before it is submitted. Only one submission per person is allowed. A Public Space reserves the right to invite submissions.

Timeline: Submissions will be accepted via Submittable from June 29, 2026-July 13, 2026. Submissions close at 11:59 p.m. (ET) on July 13. All submissions will receive a reply by the end of August.

Submission Requirements: Submissions are only accepted through Submittable. There is no submission fee. Please submit the following:

— A cover letter, including a short biographical statement and a paragraph describing the connection of your piece to the open call.

— One previously unpublished piece (fiction, nonfiction, or translation) up to 6,000 words, double spaced.

— Simultaneous submissions are allowed.

Note that we only accept PDF or Word files (.doc and .docx). Please do not include your cover letter as part of your manuscript.

Questions? Write Editorial Fellow Berta Coll at [email protected].

Recommended Reading: Below are examples of writing on impenetrability, drawn from A Public Space’s archive. These pieces are part of this month’s Public Access—work from the magazine’s archive, made free and open to all. I’ve included some pieces from elsewhere as well.

"The White Road" by Kelly Link (A Public Space No. 28) 
We know that they are monsters because they come at night and they tear us to pieces. But they are also monsters, I think, because we do not understand why they do what they do.

"Focus: Japan—America Inverted" by Roland Kelts (A Public Space No. 1)
The culture gap and the aura of mystery it confers on Japan suits some Japanese, bolstering their dearly held conviction that an essential Japaneseness can never be understood by gaijin—literally, the “outside people.” They are unique, they believe, and perhaps unfathomable. [...] As I learned when I moved to Japan in the late nineties, to ensure a sympathetic smile and a smooth journey from a Tokyo cabbie, you only need to concede that, yes, speaking Japanese is very difficult. The driver will be thrilled to have his nation’s impenetrability verified.

"The Night they First Played Monster Eyes” by Jonathan Lethem (A Public Space No. 3)
This band’s got something, and some of the something they’ve got is the allure of an enclave at odds within itself and yet impenetrable to others, its members exchanging small gestures of disaffection within their troupe that makes others crave to be included in the fond dissention.

“Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” by Anne Carson (A Public Space No. 7)
There are two kinds of silence that trouble a translator: physical silence and metaphysical silence. Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho’s inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half. Half the poem is empty space. A translator can signify or even rectify this lack of text in various ways—with blankness or brackets or textual conjecture—and she is justified in doing so because Sappho did not intend that part of the poem to fall silent. Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define. Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another. [...] But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one—a word that does not intend to be translatable. A word that stops itself. [...] There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.

“Sing, Muse, Wrath” by Allen Grossman (A Public Space No. 7)
When we say, “same world,” “same room and persons,” / “same course of life,” we speak approximately.

“Strangers” by Amy Leach (A Public Space No. 27)
Whereas strangers are all pretty much opaque—you can’t candle their heads like you candle an egg. Animals are opaque like strangers; even jellyfish and glass frogs are opaque like bears; and when their anatomy is gone, they are gone. This is not true of brothers and sisters.

About the Editorial Fellowship

Established in 2019, the Editorial Fellowship at A Public Space aims to support aspiring editors in this work. As part of their fellowships, the fellows conceive an open call, inviting submissions curated around their unique curiosities and interests. The Editorial Fellowships are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Our gratitude also to the individuals, organizations, and foundations who share our commitment to the mission of these fellowships and have provided crucial support, including the Hawthornden Foundation and Amazon Literary Partnership.