This issue begins in motion, or maybe mid-stumble.
Trip (n.): A journey, an excursion, a departure from the familiar.
Trip (v.): To stumble, to falter; to set off a mechanism that was only ever waiting.
“Trip” explores both the propulsion and rupture, the going and the going-wrong. You could be tripping happily down a path when something rises up out of nowhere and a root, a memory, a wire strung low in the dark takes you out of the equation entirely, or catapults you into a completely different experience from whatever you had planned.
What if tripping is only what happens when the ground insists on your attention?
To write into “Trip” is to explore:
- The itinerary and the interruption: the planned journey, and the instant it goes sideways.
- The altered state: chemical, spiritual, or just the vertigo of finding yourself somewhere unexpected or new.
- The mechanism orchestrated to trip on purpose: the alarm, the breaker, a trip wire, and what it means to be what sets it off.
- The stumble that transformed the story: the fall that changed everything that followed.
For the twelfth annual issue of Exposition Review, we invite work that travels in every sense of the word: road trips and guilt trips, ego trips and acid trips, the trip wire and the trip switch, the practiced trip of a dancer’s foot and the graceless trip of a shoelace. Good trips, bad trips, and plain old trips are all welcome.
This theme is a point of departure, rather than a destination. It invites us to reflect on how we set out, the interruptions that occur, and how far off course we’re willing to travel.
Let “Trip” vault you forward, send you sprawling. Let this word do what it does best: pull your footing out from under you—and into something new.
Continue reading “Call for Submissions for Vol. XII: “Trip””
2026 has already been a year of many ups, downs, and pivots. Exposition Review is not immune, so it’s fitting that for the first time in our ten(!) years of running Flash 405, we’re changing up our deadline dates and taking inspiration from another iconic Los Angeles freeway—the 10! As such, our April contest will be opening April 10 and accepting entries in all genres through May 10. 
