smoke and mold is a digital literary journal invested in the possibilities trans lives bring to our changing nature-culture.
smoke and mold publishes nature writing, broadly defined, by trans and Two-Spirit writers. read more below about our pro-Palestine, anti-AI, and anti-Zionist stance, as well as our original editorial statement from 2019, which lays out smoke and mold’s vision for the 12 years of our existence.
smoke and mold will expire in 2031, at which point we will work on archiving the work we’ve published both online and in print.
Below is smoke and mold’s original editorial statement published in September 2019 with the launch of the journal.
12 years: an editorial statement
“We do not write during the apocalypse, which is old, but in a world located beyond it.”
— Ignacio Padilla
Climate change and trans people: both are realities difficult for the cis population to understand. Both involve patterns of change and regeneration not easily observable using the templates provided by cisgender and capitalist lives. We don’t think amplifying trans writers will change that. But trans writers have been imagining new ways of living and writing for generations. Two Spirit writers for much longer than that. Despite all of this, the trans body is still subject to a failure of imagination in the popular consciousness. The trans body is considered “unnatural”, its changes supposedly go “against nature”, with few in mainstream literature, medicine, or history acknowledging that nature is nothing but change.
Trans lives have much to say about the meeting of nature and culture, but trans writers have been mostly ignored by anthologies, journals, and books purporting to be about the ways humans and nature interact. Our role is larger than what we’ve been accorded; it’s not to show that trans people are “natural” — a meaningless word— but to illuminate the many ways in which nature and the environment are trans in their very essence.
The duty of the writer is to elevate the many small human crises above the white noise of capitalism’s death shudders: people living with radiation in their bodies; people gunned down while selling cigarettes or at a traffic stop by agents of the state; people defending their water while being bitten by dogs; people cooking dinner under the whistling missiles manufactured by the U.S.. Even smaller, still: the blind woman boarding the bus with her guide dog, cursing the banks of snow and ice that trip her; the bottle redemption center refusing to take in recyclables from a brown man; those who manage to continue living while doctors refuse to understand their needs and families refuse to remember them. These crises are easily subsumed by the supposed high stakes of Western civilization’s collapse, represented by “true” apocalypse. Pundits try to dramatize a new Armageddon every news cycle, while we look on holding apocalypses within ourselves like Russian nesting dolls. If we fail to make these stories heard or simply never bother trying, then the same tired story will continue repeating itself long after capitalism has lost all vitality, continually reanimated like a zombie, justifying the most extreme measures in order to hold onto power. Perhaps this is already happening.
Capitalism has made crisis the natural state of things, and a cycle of crisis cannot be disrupted by thwarting it; rather, we must find strategies to make crisis work in our favor. To cling to the hull of apocalypse and manipulate it. To make space for our stories. Because stories can disrupt a system, even one built on cycles of manufactured doom.
Smoke and mold are signs of what’s coming, and of what’s been; of wildfires and floods gone by and still to come. Smoke and mold are pervasive; they linger and change the smell of things, insinuate themselves into the tiniest of cracks and cause trouble. They will soon be more abundant in our air and more prevalent in our imaginations. The journal will publish 24 issues: 2 each year for 12 years — the amount of time allotted us by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Thematically, it places no restrictions on what counts as nature, and writers must only self-identify as trans or Two Spirit to be included. We are not gatekeepers of who does and doesn’t “count”. The majority of work featured, however, will be prose (for lack of a better word): fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, investigations, musings, and occasional prose poems. There are many wonderful journals supporting trans poets and nature as a field of investigation, but fewer invested in the narrative possibilities that trans lives bring to our changing nature-culture. It’s these that smoke and mold will bring to the fore.
statements
End Zionism. End Colonialism. End the genocide of Palestinians.
In summer 2024, we divested from Wix.
smoke and mold is against AI
07.11.26
smoke and mold does not accept work generated with or assisted by artificial intelligence, Chat GPT, or any other Large Language Model which we will collectively refer to here as AI. Some of us think this goes without saying, and yet, as a journal that enthusiastically, repeatedly, and somewhat compulsively touches the boundaries of what is human and what is natural, we think it’s worth laying out all the reasons why we see AI as incompatible with our mission and ethics as a publication. This topic is vast, but here are some of the reasons for our stance.
AI is an outgrowth of settler colonialism, racism, slavery, and imperialism, heading the planet and its human and more-than-human inhabitants towards environmental destruction. The expansion of computing power for AI depends on the massive consumption of electricity and water needed to power and cool down data centers, which accelerate environmental destruction with their emissions and pollution. In many instances, whole communities have been cut off from access to water due to data centers’ pollution and seizure of water.
Data centers’ cooling systems and generators emit a constant, penetrating, low-frequency mechanical noise which combined with all-night artificial lighting disrupts wildlife and creates “sensory danger zones” for humans and the more-than-human alike. The location of data centers is not random nor neutral. Data centers are often built in areas with a prevalence of black, brown, and working-class people–communities that are already subjected to elevated police violence and surveillance, and less likely to be able to legally challenge the building of data centers.
AI is always, inevitably, a racializing technology, and, in manifold ways, it targets non-white, poor, working-class people considered expendable by racial capitalism. Those who feed the extensive amount of information into AI machines and review content, training the algorithms AI uses to function, are mostly Global Southerners, people in refugee camps, and people in prisons–barely paid, subjected to constant surveillance, and working for 18 and more hours a day. Furthermore, AI is never neutral in the face of genocide. Israel’s genocide on Palestine and its people is an AI powered genocide and Apartheid. The Zionist state is supported in its settler colonial genocidal project by US tech companies, providing tools such as facial recognition, object tracking, and cloud storage for surveillance data on Palestinians. Purchased via Microsoft Azure, the LLM integrated into Israel’s elite cyber warfare squad’s (Unit 8200) internal, offline system is by OpenAI (ChatGPT’s parent company). AI tools are used by the Israeli army to plan and execute air strikes, generating more targets in a single day than human personnel can produce in a year. AI is actively murdering Palestinian people and is increasingly becoming one of the main weapons of Israel’s genocidal project.
In a time when we are inundated with pro-AI propaganda in our email inboxes, on our phones, in ad breaks and in the news, it can seem like the fight for a human-centered, art-forward future based in justice is already lost. We disagree vehemently. We do not think this fight is lost, and we are still interested exclusively in work written and made by people. Although it is unlikely, if we end up discovering that a piece we have published was written whole or in part using generative AI and/or LLMs, we will remove it from the site. You have been warned!
(We remain interested in pieces experimenting with and exploring the interactions between humans and technologies when the artist and the resulting work are both capable of reflecting critically and with transparency on this union, as in the case of Allison Parrish’s “Epilith Poems” from Issue 4.1, Spring 2021, but this does not apply to any piece generated with or assisted by generative AI.)
End Zionism.
End Colonialism.
End the genocide of Palestinians.
5.29.24
smoke and mold is proud to join with other publishers calling for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as stipulated by international law. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is one way we stand in solidarity with Palestinians experiencing genocide under Israeli occupation and apartheid; publishing and amplifying voices of Palestinian writers is another. If you are a Palestinian or Arab writer and our mission appeals to you, we sincerely hope you will reach out about publishing your work.
smoke and mold echoes the growing international call to return land to its original stewards: land back, from Palestine to Turtle Island!
In summer 2024, we divested from Wix and launched this new website on Wordpress. As Israel’s most valuable company, Wix profits from apartheid and while Palestinian homes are bulldozed to make way for Israeli occupation. In addition, after October 7 Wix fired employees who spoke out in support of Palestine. In 2020, smoke and mold started making a monthly donation to the Palestinian Youth Movement in the same amount we paid to Wix to host our site. This donation doesn’t cancel anything out, of course, but we continue to make it now.