The Reservoir, a biannual journal published by Woodbine and Autonomedia, is currently accepting submissions for our second issue, Belief and the Communal, which will be published this June.

For close to a decade, Woodbine has been a volunteer-run experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens for developing the practices, skills, and tools needed to build autonomy. Since its inception Woodbine has hosted thousands of talks and workshops, a weekly dinner, a food pantry, poetry readings, a gym and fitness classes, figure drawing, a hackerspace, seed exchanges, language classes, soccer teams, children’s programming, a woodshop, sewing classes, and a screening series, all offered for free and by donation. 

Woodbine is a collective of people with differing beliefs and backgrounds, not united by dogma or any singular ideology, but rather a shared ethic of mutual aid and autonomy. This multiplicity has formed our communal experience here in New York City, and we look for writing that examines the many facets and histories of like-minded projects and experiments.

We are currently thinking together about the meaning, horizon, and relevance of the communal, of belief, and of our dis- and re-enchantments. This includes experiments in communal living, separatist and sectarian movements, anarchist utopias, religious cults, and writings and art that challenge our structures of relation. We want work that analyzes historical systems of thought and morality, the sacred and sacrilege, underground guerrilla movements and secret societies, theologic esoterica, alternative economies, witches, new age, ecology, “community”, life in the metropolis, back to the land, nostalgia, ritual, diaspora, prepper groups, psychedelia, experimental architecture, and raves — and thinks critically about commonalities and how they are formed. 

We want your essays, poetry, histories, short stories, interviews, political treatises, archival finds, translations, letters, criticism, black-and-white art and photography, collages, comics, and maps. Please no footnotes; include all references and elaborations within the text itself.  

We are sharing the introduction to the first edition of The Reservoir below. Please take some time to read it to get a sense of our journal. 

Send us submissions, pitches, works of art and photography, and previously unpublished pieces that are less than 6000 words to thereservoir@woodbine.nyc  The deadline is March 15th.