When the Sentience crew began the journey to publishing the “Isolation” issue in the Summer of 2020, I’m not sure any of us knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into, despite having worked on other lit mags before.

At the time, we tentatively floated the idea amongst ourselves that, if we could pull it off, a small run of a magazine might be in order for contributors, to mark the occasion. As the scale of project and our ambitions for it took shape, however, we were forced to put a pin in the idea of printing physical copies of Issue #1. But we still wanted to do something that people could carry around, that our contributors could hold on to beyond a URL.

So today, we’re excited to share with you – with everyone – the Isolation issue of Sentience in a PDF format to download and enjoy on your computer and mobile devices. And for free!

But why now? you may ask the glaring light of your screen. Because we’re also announcing that Sentience Literary Journal will be returning for a second issue in the Fall of 2021. We are excited at the prospect of creating a “bookend” issue to last winter’s isolation, and so our theme for Issue #2 will be “Connections.”

We are still mostly* limiting submissions to writers and artists who are students, alumni, teachers, or administrators of Antioch University (any of the four physical campuses or the two online programs), our collective alma mater. This is not because we don’t love and appreciate the wider world of writers, but because we are a limited team with limited resources. It is also because, in keeping with Antioch’s own credo, we’re hoping to encourage more of our fellow Antiochians to share their diverse and innovative voices in the world of literary and artistic publications. In the future, we hope we might be able to throw the figurative doors open wide to any and all creatives, but for now, we’re but a small journal and must bite off what we can actually chew in order to be fair to our submitters and readers alike.

(That asterisk is up there because our readers and editors do, on occasion, solicit material directly from writers and artists we’re particularly excited about who we’ve encountered outside the Antioch sphere. In the Isolation issue, we welcomed photographer Tristan Onfroy’s work in this manner.)

The submission window for Issue #2: Connections, will be open now through the end of September 2021 and you can expect the issue in the late fall of this year!

Thank you again for reading Sentience and we hope to get a chance to read your work soon!

Helen Doremus, Managing Editor