Editorial Open Call — No, thanks

“For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.” ― Gertrude Stein

“The things useless are the things most useful under different circumstances (to give one example: a little stone lazy by a stream, which becomes important when you happen to hear its sermon), he will see that the aspect of uselessness in poetry is to be doubly valued since its usefulness is always born from it like the day out of the bosom of night.” — Yoné Noguchi

For our first editorial cycle, we ground our focus on refusal and uselessness.

We welcome pitches and submissions for essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, and other unconventional formats which engage with refusal and uselessness as strategic and liberatory ways of learning and living.

• What is worth refusing?
• What are ways of refusing that we've not fully considered?
• Was there something useless in your life that turned out to be immensely useful?
• What forms of uselessness not only free us from dominant narratives of being productive, useful, usable, but set us on radically and differently meaningful paths?
• How do notions of uselessness or refusal intersect with ecological and/or communal ways of being in the world?
• What can we learn from the useless or vestigial?

We also invite engagements with refuse in the sense of trash, garbage, waste.

• What are unexpected ways of engaging with waste?
• How does life make waste of us, and how can life be reimagined from the POV of garbage?
• How can we understand processes of decay, rotting, and fermentation within the context of education and learning?
• How can a reimagined relationship with trash map onto our response to the climate emergency?

These are suggestive prompts that you can go beyond. More than anything else, we are interested in writing which revitalizes uselessness, refuse, and/or refusal as meaningful dimensions of life. Bonus: We would especially like if your perspective to unfolded not only within the content of your writing, but to also suffused the form or format of your piece.

This editorial cycle will be edited by Co-Founder & Editor Ang Kia Yee.

This Open Call will be open from January to June 2026, with pitches and submissions considered on a rolling basis. You should expect to hear back from us within 2 weeks.

We do not have a word count range and will consider length on a case-by-case basis. However, regardless of the length of your piece, we ask that your pitch or submission has rigour, that is: a powerful commitment to its interest or central throughline, whether that lies in seriousness, or disruption, or lucidity, or depth, or play.

Please submit in both Word Doc and PDF formats. We do not accept submissions in Pages format.

We have no preference between British or American spelling. However, we enjoy the Oxford comma.

All accepted pieces will undergo an editorial process that spans 1-3 rounds of editing in total, depending on the needs of the piece of writing.

We pay within the range of SGD50 to SGD400 per piece, depending on length, rigour, and genre. Our decision on the amount is final.

Please direct all submissions to contact@nothingisuseless.world, with the subject line: "[Submission/ Pitch]: No, thanks — [your name]".

Pitches should include

• a max. 250-word brief of what your piece will cover;
• a max. 120-word bio and why you are the right person for this piece of writing;
• an estimated word count for your piece; and
• 2-3 samples of your writing

Submissions should include

• your finished piece in .docx and .pdf formats; and
• a max. 120-word bio

You can also opt to submit your entry or parts of your entry as a voice or video recording, following the word counts laid out above. Except in cases where none of these options are viable for you, we do not accept AI-generated text-to-speech or video entries.

We would love if you include a more informal self-introduction, telling us more about you in whatever aspects you want to share. But we will not turn away entries that don't have this.