Get involved with Backslash
by hosting workshops and contributing to our blog!
Earlier this month, we sent out a poll on Twitter to better understand how you all engage with us. Out of those who responded, we were pretty split between hobbyist creative coders, those who were still learning, and those who were just starting out. We’re delighted to see the range of our audience, and to share some new opportunities with you.
For our beginners and learners, we’re spending this fall creating informational content and resources to help you explore. For our hobbyists, we’re inviting you to share your knowledge by hosting a workshop with us! Over the past year and a half, we’ve been inspired by the creativity and processes of our submitters and would particularly love to see previous contributors presenting.
Our workshops will run during the late fall and/or early winter of this year — we don’t have specific dates yet and will work with presenters to schedule. Some topics we’d love to see in these workshops include (but are absolutely not limited to!)…
- Interactive and hypertext fiction
- Generative writing (particularly with NaNoGenMo coming up)
- Sound art
- Livecoding
- Generative art
If you are interested in presenting, fill out this form and we will be in touch with you shortly. Workshop presenters will be compensated with a $20 stipend. We aim to fund 4–5 workshops this season and would greatly appreciate support — we are collecting donations through Ko-fi in order to pay our presenters and for a Zoom license.
We’d also love to highlight your voices on our new blog, regardless of your experience level. Beginners and veterans alike are invited to share their thoughts and experiences on our platform!
For the blog, we’re looking for media reviews, tutorials, reflections on artistic processes, journalism on new media events — anything related to creative coding and electronic literature that can be presented in a written format. (We welcome blog posts with images, videos, and multimedia content as well — we’re Backslash Lit. How could we not?) This blog, and the zine as a whole, is by no means an academic journal. We’re inviting you to be as casual and expressive as you’d like.
If you’re interested in contributing to our blog, please fill out this form with a brief pitch to hear back from us within two weeks. You do not need to have a draft written yet — if we approve your idea, you will have two weeks to send in a draft for proofreading, then a week after receiving our suggestions to send us your final copy. This timeline is flexible, though the sooner you send in your drafts, the sooner it can be published online!
Blog contributions are unpaid for this time.
At Backslash Lit, we are committed to making creative coding more accessible and amplifying marginalized voices in both tech and arts spaces. Our priority is to facilitate learning and community this fall, and we would love to hear from creatives of all different backgrounds and skillsets.
Thank you for reading, and please reach out to us if you have any questions, comments, and suggestions. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter, and our email address is listed on our website. We look forward to hearing from you all!