SHAMBLES
A Messy Magazine for Messy Writers
What is Shambles?
Shambles is an online magazine where undergraduate students can submit their short stories, either finished or unfinished, for publishing. Writing is a mess, and we understand that. Shambles asks you to write something that you’re working on, or have been working on, and send it in as the beginning of something greater. Submit the first part of a multi-part story for further serialization or submit a purposefully unfinished story and allow another writer to continue the mess.
Submit to join us for our first issue:
“People on Fire”
About
One of my favorite words is “shambles,” admittedly for pretty silly reasons. There’s this quick whisp of air that escapes your lips when you say it. Its sound exists like the clashing of cymbals. And when you look further into the word, what it actually means and exists as a result of, you find something interesting. While the word itself describes a mess, a state of incredible disarray, historically, the word used to be synonymous with slaughterhouse, a place where farm animals are chopped into meat. A very messy place. And that kind of spoke to me.
Writing is a very messy process. We think of incidents and stories and verbalized feelings that we think are meaningful and fantastic and then, the very next week, we leave them for dead, chasing the kicked-up dust of new ideas that we will one day abandon all the same. And when we do finally capture something, then we have to actually put it out there. We might release it out into the world, only to see it hit the pavement as soon as it takes wing. What if what we’ve made is something already said? What if what we’ve made is something that no one will care about? What if we’re just writing mess after mess? You’re not wrong to be afraid of that but I think, at least, that we write because we want to, because there’s something beautiful in doing so, something triumphant in making something that is both yours and beautiful. I don’t think I have ever stopped writing because I was afraid of the mess, and if you’re reading this, then I hope you don’t either.
-Eli, Editor-In-Chief