Guidelines for creative writing: Poetry submissions should not exceed 5 pages. Flash fiction should be between100-500 words and short fiction and memoirs between 2000-3000 words. Submit to: Paola Corso. Guidelines for essays: Essays should not exceed 5,000 words. Submit to: Dr. Nandita Ghosh.

Coeditors: Paola Corso is a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. Her poetry and fiction are set in her native Pittsburgh river town and explore the environmental impact of industrialization from a working-class perspective. She and Dr. Anna Kay France co-edited the book, International Women Playwrights. She currently teaches a prose workshop at Fordham University. Nandita Ghosh is an assistant professor at Farleigh Dickinson University where she teaches courses on literature, culture, and the environment. She was involved in mobilizing active support in the US against the construction of the Maheshwar dam on the River Narmada and has networked with members of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (a grassroots movement in India protesting the environmental damage and human displacement caused by damming the River Narmada), as well as various human rights and environmental groups based in the US.

Statement of Aims:

Confluence: A Global Anthology of Women's Voices on the Politics of Water combines poetry, short fiction, testimonial accounts, and essays on how water crosses various boundaries be they national, racial, ethnic, class, or gender. This anthology is a response to the growing concern over the role of water in our increasingly fragile environment, a concern that is sure to become more anxiety prone in the 21st Century as debates over modernization and development become more acrid.

Background:

Since the 1940s and 1950s, governments have promoted dam and reservoir construction as part of national campaigns for developing their countries. Evidence in the last 50 years shows these dams have not prevented floods, water logging, soil erosion, or the endangerment of aquatic flora and fauna. In most cases, dams have forced the displacement of communities whose livelihoods depend on the river. This has sparked worldwide protests against dams in places as diverse as China, Uganda, Namibia, Brazil, Bogota, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India. Growing networks of activists and individuals are challenging these constructions of destructive river development projects. In Pakistan, activists staged a protest about plans to build a canal they claim will deplete their water supply from the Indus River on which they depend.

Apart from damming rivers, water privatization is an increasing phenomenon that has sparked global protests. Is water a commodity or a human right? Many governments in developing countries have reached a consensus that water is a commodity. On the other hand, civil society groups firmly believe that water is a natural resource that belongs equally to all people and should stay a public utility. At the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto earlier this year, civil society groups protested water privatization because they believe that corporations value capital, infrastructure, and investments more than people or the environment. For example, they cited water projects controlled by Bechtel in Bolivia and the Philippines as examples of what should be avoided. Bechtel took over the water supply in Cochabamba City, Bolivia, in1999. In the space of a few months, the price of drinking water more than doubled. Furthermore, World Bank-sponsored studies show that the urban poor already pay five times the municipal rate for water in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, 25 times more in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and 40 times more in Cairo, Egypt. Typically, development institutions have answered people's lack of access to safe drinking water by privatizing community assets and effectively handing them over to the global water industry. AID/WATCH, which campaigns against private participation in essential water supply, asserts that water privatization is often imposed as a condition to obtain loans and debt relief. For example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) persuaded the government in Ghana to sell water utilities in order to reduce the national debt in 2001. The Indian government took away the rights of villages along that part of the Sheonath River that it ceded to Soni's Radius Water Industry through the Rasmada project commissioned in April 2001. Fishing is an unauthorized activity here, so is diverting water to irrigate fields.

Water pollution has also been an ongoing public concern globally. In the United States, Pittsburgh had the highest rate of typhoid fever because it was still dumping raw, untreated sewage and industrial waste into the rivers and pumping untreated drinking water out of the rivers in many municipalities until the 1950s. In 1978, the Love Canal became an infamous hazardous water site, when a former chemical landfill poisoned the canal way in a 15-acre neighborhood in Niagara Falls. Also in the 1970s, the Cuyahoga River in the Cleveland area was so full of flammable pollutants that it caught on fire. Global politics surrounding the issue of water pollution has instigated a variety of volatile responses. For example, Coca Cola has faced increasing social protests against its bottling practices in India and Panama where communities are going thirsty as Coca-Cola draws water from the common water resources. Its operations are polluting the scarce water that remains. Coca Cola has been fined and sued for fraud.

Guidelines for creative writing: Poetry submissions should not exceed 5 pages. Flash fiction should be between100-500 words and short fiction and memoirs between 2000-3000 words.

Guidelines for creative writing: Poetry submissions should not exceed 5 pages. Flash fiction should be between100-500 words and short fiction and memoirs between 2000-3000 words.

Rationale:

Think tanks, NGOs, and academic departments have churned out a spate of scholarship on specific issues concerning the damming of rivers, privatization of water, and water pollution. The International Rivers Network, the Center for Economic and Social Rights, Friends of the Earth International, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Urgewald in Germany are only a few such organizations involved with scholarship and advocacy on the politics of water. Poets, writers, filmmakers, and artists have also responded with creative activity. In India, Sekhar Kapoor, director of Elizabeth, is planning a new film Pani (water), which will focus on a week without water in the lives of Mumbai dwellers. Mahasweta Devi's short story "Jol" (water) concerns the lives of tribals in the North-East. The anti-dam movement in the Narmada River valley has inspired several films by different filmmakers on the politics of water. "Jila Jumu Jiwari Wirrkuj,"' an exhibition of paintings about water by Mangkaja Arts, was presented at a creative symposium entitled, "Water: Histories, Cultures and Ecologies," held at the University of Western Australia in July 2003. It traced the cultural, historical, and environmental beliefs and practices associated with water production and use. Furthermore, the United Nations has declared 2003 as the "Inteernational Year of Freshwater." Following this announcement, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has recently released a report, which provides an overview of the world's freshwater resources. These are in a state of imminent crisis, a crisis that will place the foundations of life on this earth on a precarious footing by the end of the 21st Century.

Thus Confluence: A Global Anthology of Women's Voices on the Politics of Water also stems from the same impulses that direct the above mentioned creative and scholarly activities. It fuses together the voices of activists, poets, writers, and scholars in its focus on the impact of human activity on water as reflected in and represented by the stories we create about the environment. These narratives reveal how our perceptions construct our relations to nature. This anthology will examine how such constructions function as stories within which we live sustainably or unsustainably. These narratives cross national boundaries by coming from places as diverse as the Pacific Rim, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and South Asia. They also cross borders between genres; poetry, short stories, and essays will address water as myth, metaphor, and material reality. In short, this anthology will incorporate a range of issues such as droughts and floods, waste management, dams and irrigation, water pollution, water as a national or racial barrier, and water as a feminine space over which the masculine process of industrialization claims agency.