“Look up” is what I hear myself telling our seven year old almost every day. They say it could help us avoid text-neck. More importantly, there’s something grounding about witnessing the endlessness above us, how it holds space for both chaos and calm, for both the known and unknowable, and room for possibility. And every seven-year old should experience endlessness every so often.
Welcome to This Makes up the Sky: A Year of Looking Upward.
I’m excited to introduce myself to you as the newest Women Who Submit Blog Managing Editor. In the months prior to submitting my proposal for this series, I spent some time thinking of ways to continue writing while the world continues to erupt. I thought about the sky and how everything it holds is connected by that very thing, that perfect relationship of gravity and orbital motion. And when I came up with the series, I thought about what it means to create a shared space where writers can explore their own relationship with what the sky holds. The sky, in all its iterations, offers us a universal connection point—as simple as it sounds—we’re all under it, all witnessing its changes, all carrying our own interpretations.
Over the coming year, we’ll explore six themes that together tell the story of our shared sky. We’ll begin with Dreams – those just-above-the-surface visions that shape our understanding of what’s possible. From there, we’ll witness the mathematics of flight through Birds, explore the systems that animate unwritten rules in Weather, investigate the always shifting narratives of Clouds, contemplate precipitation in all its forms through Rain, and finally, we’ll discover the architecture of collective movement in Murmurations. For each theme (except Murmurations), we’ll publish four pieces that approach the subject from different angles, different genres, different perspectives – creating a mosaic of how we understand and experience these elements that make up our sky.
As a publisher, I consider myself lucky to have been able to approach anthology curation as a form of collective meaning-making. It’s a practice that might begin in what feels like a selfish place – this desire to reach out, to gather stories, to make sense of the world through perspective. But what comes of it is always so much more, I mean, isn’t this why we write and read and create and…all of it? Research has consistently shown that engaging with art and creative expression provides tangible, memorable real-life benefits for our emotional and psychological wellbeing. When we write about our experiences, when we share our perspectives, we’re not just creating sentences and paragraphs—we’re participating in one or more forms of collective healing. Studies show that we’re activating multiple brain regions and circuits, fostering neural connections that support regulation and cognitive resilience. In times when the world shows its horrendousness, a slight turn toward reflection and creative expression becomes essential.
I truly hope you enjoy reading each piece throughout the year, and the collective sum. And for those interested in submitting work, please read through the submission guidelines. I look forward to reading your work—your poems, your flash fiction, your essays, your hybrid forms. Each submission is a way of mapping the world around and above us, of making sense of both the physical and metaphysical. Through your words, we’ll build a constellation of perspectives, a year-long exploration of how we understand, imagine, and inhabit the space above us.
Looking Forward,
Jessica Ceballos y Campbell
Jessica Ceballos y Campbell, Blog Managing Editor (she/they), is a writer, content strategist, publisher, and advocate whose work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals and three chapbooks: Gent/Re De Place Ing (2016), End of the Road (2017), and Facilitating Spaces 101: A Manual for equitable Arts Programming (2018), and has produced a ton of literary events throughout LA. She lives with her husband, seven-year-old, and their gato in Los Angeles, where she runs a small press and where she is ever-attempting to work on Happiest Place on Earth, her poetry contribution to conversations around memory, place, and belonging, inspired by a trip to Disneyland while in the foster system. www.jessicaceballos.com