The Gravity of the Thing is an independent magazine dedicated to defamiliarized creative writing. Our publications have been anthologized in Best Small Fictions, noted in the Best American series, and named finalists in the Shirley Jackson Awards, and we are also 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 creative work by writers with varying experiences and perspectives. We encourage previously unpublished writers to submit, and we aim to support work by writers historically underrepresented in literary publishing—to learn more, please visit our “Baring the Device: Ethics in Publishing” article. You can also 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.