"The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions." - Henry David Thoreau
Wild Roof Journal is an online art & literary publication that features work from a wide range of creative people—writers, poets, artists, and anyone else who is passionate about the creative process and self-expression.
In 2020, we began with the primary goal of providing a welcoming environment for artists and writers to share their work, offering opportunities for creative people to connect with each other and with audiences that would appreciate their work. Our continued vision is to grow through collaboration and a shared interest to expand poetry’s reach.
The people behind the scenes of Wild Roof are fellow artists—we know the amount of time and energy it takes to produce a finished piece, and the challenges of getting it out into the world for people to see.
Our issues are open-themed. We do have a particular interest for themes relating to nature & environment, including the intersection of “wild” nature and “civilized” society. Admittedly, these are some loaded terms, and we want to keep a lot of room open for your interpretations of them. Our emphasis is on presenting the most engaging and thoughtful artwork possible, not on adhering to strict rules for subject matter or style. As a guideline for what we find interesting, here are a few points to consider:
- Our aesthetic preferences are varied, and we have broad margins for unique perspectives and experimentation. With wildness comes some level of the unpredictable, unexpected, and weird…. If you feel like you do things a bit differently than “the norm” (whatever that means to you), then you’re probably in the right place!
- Remember: Humans are nature too, with all their remarkable intricacies and confounding limitations (which is to say that we do not entirely consist of poems about trees and rocks but do think those things are very cool things to write poems about). *It’s a balance*
- We tend to like work that is inquisitive and curious, at times mysterious, at times playful. So, if you find questions more interesting than answers, you’re on the right track for us!
Although we have categories for our submissions, we are absolutely interested in hybrid forms or work that defies easy categorization. If this describes your work, we encourage you to submit; if necessary, you may pick the category that’s most fitting and add a note to explain your work in more detail.
Over the past several years, we’ve built a creative community of emerging & established writers, visual artists, teachers, grad students, mental health professionals, travelers, hermits, vagabonds, ragamuffins, etc. etc. In addition to quarterly issues published on the Wild Roof Journal website, we offer weekly Substack features, and a monthly (most of the time) podcast.
The WRJ podcast is just the right level of nerdy (but not pretentious) fun; the riffing and talk of craft is inspiring.
-Dana, contributor
More About Us
(the longer version)
The name of our publication comes from a line in William Blake’s The Book of Urizen:
…a roof, shaggy, wild, enclos’d
In an orb his fountain of thought
When universal consciousness takes human form, a separation must occur as the infinite is made finite, and the individual is divided from the cosmos by a “wild, shaggy roof.”
The phrase “wild roof” fits our vision for this journal, as it combines the macro and micro, the concerns of the world at large and subjective human experience, the untamed wildness of nature and social structures of civilization.
Of course, William Blake was both a poet and visual artist, which also is a fitting combination for our journal.
As we considered the vision for our journal, the themes of nature and environmental issues became our particular interests, so the concept of “the wild” is something we would like to explore further.
In his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau famously states, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World,” and this is one of the central ideas we would like to run with. Thoreau goes on to say, “In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.…A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower.” In Wild Roof, we would like to explore the connections between the wild and tame, the natural and civilized, the spontaneous and structured.
The reoccurring concepts of art and nature are perfectly encapsulated in Gary Snyder’s essay “Etiquette of Freedom,” which appears in the collection titled The Practice of the Wild. The poet and environmental activist traces some useful linguistic origins in this passage:
[W]hat can we now mean by the words wild and for that matter nature? Language meanders like great rivers leaving oxbow traces over forgotten beds, to be seen only from the air or by scholars. Language is like some kind of infinitely interfertile family of species spreading or mysteriously declining over time, shamelessly and endlessly hybridizing, changing its own rules as it goes. Words are used as signs, as stand-ins, arbitrary and temporary, even as language reflects (and informs) the shifting values of the peoples whose minds it inhabits and glides through . . . But it is sometimes worth tracking these tricksters back.
Take nature first. The word nature is from Latin natura, “birth, constitution, character, course of things”—ultimately from nasci, to be born. So we have nation, natal, native, pregnant. The probably Indo-European root (via Greek gna—hence cognate, agnate) is gen (Sanskrit jan), which provides generate and genus, as well as kin and kind.
So, embedded within “nature” is the generative force, the creative impulse, the sense of connection, and the birth of new beginnings that are the foundation of our publication. We hope that you will be a part of our journal as we grow!
