The Gravity of the Thing is an independent magazine dedicated to innovative and defamiliarized creative writing. Since the journal’s inception in 2013, The Gravity of the Thing has been named one of thirty best online magazines by Bookfox, our publications have been finalists in the Shirley Jackson Awards and anthologized in Best Small Fictions, and we are the grateful recipient of a grant from Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council. Our ongoing goal is to publish work that defamiliarizes literary forms, writing that stranges to achieve a renewed sense of discovery.

Defamiliarization: an artistic or literary technique that presents the common in unfamiliar ways; that which has been taken for granted is reenvisioned, made strange, to heighten a reader’s perception of the familiar.

“Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war… And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”

—Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

As the editors of The Gravity of the Thing aim to publish writing that defamiliarizes, so do we aim to defamiliarize conventional editing and publishing models. To learn more about defamiliarized writing and our editorial processes, please visit our Baring the Device column.

The Gravity of the Thing publishes writers of varying experience. We encourage previously unpublished writers to submit, and we aim to support writing by those often marginalized in the literary conversation, including (though certainly not limited to) writers from the BIPOC communities, women or nonbinary writers, writers with disabilities, and writers from the LGBTQIA2S+ communities. Click here to view our submission guidelines, and for submission updates and other journal news, please click here to sign up for our monthly newsletter.