Howl & Hold: feral grief zine | Open submissions
Issue Two: ALTARS | Call for Submissions
Grief builds shrines in the unlikeliest of places: a jacket never worn again, a half-empty cup on the kitchen table, a saved voicemail. Some altars we build with intention—candles lit, photos framed, stones carefully placed. Others assemble themselves slowly, without our permission or awareness. Howl & Hold Issue II invites you to explore the sacred spaces of your grief—those built, stumbled upon, or refused.
This issue, ALTARS, asks: What do you return to again and again in your mourning? What objects or spaces have become charged with meaning? What cannot be held, even here?
Prompts for this issue include:
Grief Talisman – If your grief could take physical form—if you could carry it in your pocket, wear it on a chain, keep it tucked in a drawer—what would it be? Describe it in vivid detail or sketch it, paint it, sculpt it. Is it heavy or weightless, glowing or dull? What textures, sounds, or scents does it hold? Do you have an actual grief talisman?
Altar of the Everyday – What quiet rituals or objects have become sacred since your loss? Photograph or write about an “altar” that has formed unintentionally—your nightstand, a cluttered shelf, the inside of your glovebox. What meaning does it hold?
What the Altar Cannot Hold – Create a piece (poem, prose, collage, etc.) about the things too large, too raw, or too unnameable to fit on any altar. What truths or feelings spill off the edge? What gets left behind?
Vestiges & Visions – Grief often leaves traces—images that haunt, symbols that return, colors we can’t stop painting with. What visions rise when you give grief form without words? Create an image, comic, painting, or collage that channels your mourning through texture, line, shape, or shadow. What visual language does your grief speak? What ghosts appear when you draw from memory? What remains when words fail?
We welcome submissions across all mediums: writing (poetry, prose, hybrid), visual art, photography, collage, or anything else that gives form to the feral, the sacred, the unspeakable. And, as always, submissions that do not precisely fall within these guidelines but are pertinent to your grief are WELCOME.
Let this be a place to remember, to rage, to resist forgetting. Let this be your altar.
Why We Need Wild and Feral Collective Grief Spaces
Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is not a personal failure or a detour from being “okay.” It is a natural, sacred, and often devastating response to loss—and not just the loss of people we love, but also to the unraveling of systems, safety, ecosystems, dreams, and ways of life.
In dominant Western culture, grief is too often domesticated. It's rushed, silenced, flattened into five tidy stages or pathologized into something that needs to be “treated.” We're told to grieve quietly, in private, preferably without disrupting anyone else. But grief is disruptive. It should be. It’s a protest against what was taken and a testament to what mattered.
Wild grief spaces—feral, collective, and messy—are necessary because our grief is too big to carry alone. When we grieve together, in community, we create a kind of sanctuary where wailing, rage, numbness, and stillness can all belong. These spaces resist the pressure to be composed or linear. They allow grief to be a teacher, a force, a portal—not just an experience to “get over,” but one that can transform us and the world we’re trying to build.
Feral grief spaces reconnect us with something ancient and deeply human: the right to mourn out loud, to witness and be witnessed, to honor what we've lost in a way that’s not sanitized or hidden. These are spaces where we can howl, collapse, chant, or simply sit in the ruins together. No fixing. No advice. Just truth.
In a time of mass extinction, racial violence, displacement, and chronic disconnection, collective grief isn’t optional—it’s survival. It is how we metabolize sorrow into solidarity. It is how we stay tender in a world that wants us numb. And it is how we begin to imagine life beyond the ruins, together.
