In the age of Identity Politics, men who do not feel the need to add any of the alphabet-soup qualifiers to their identities as men are being assaulted by sociopolitical challenges and threats they never imagined they would have to face…and there no doubt are more on the horizon.
Writing Men is a new Sparking Zone project aimed at developing a literary arena in which men…through their writing…can express and exchange their experiences as men, their concepts and definitions of masculinity, and the critical challenges to their images and identities as men.
We believe there are only two organic, biological identities for nearly all living entities: Male and Female. Period.
Today, however, each of the two primary strata now contain myriad subdivisions, categories, and qualifying denominators…virtually all of which are invented by society for the purposes of grouping us demographically together in manageable sociopolitical and economic camps.
The two substrata that have long been…and probably ever will be…intensely problematic are: Hetero and Homo. Most people will immediately want to expand those tags by adding “sexual”…but that is only one aspect of our identities. And while sex and all of its attending trappings may loom large in our imaginations, it actually is not as important as we think in the overall scheme of what constitutes a human being.
We believe the better, more modern terms for categorizing men and women are Heterocentric and Homocentric. These terms encompass the basic qualities that apply to our masculine and feminine aspects: Social, Emotional, Romantic, and, yes, Sexual.
Speaking here for men, heterocentric and homocentric males are virtually identical in all aspects of what we call “life”…except the hetero group generally, though not exclusively, draws social, emotional, romantic, and sexual fulfillment from the opposite sex, while the homo group generally, and again not exclusively, draws that fulfillment from the same sex.
So…whether you are a heterocentric or homocentric man, if you have written a short story, poem, or personal memoir that you feel fits the goals of Writing Men, please consider submitting it for publication here on the Sparking Zone site.
Twice yearly we will award small honoraria to exemplary pieces that have had their premiere publication on the Sparking Zone site and have garnered significant public response.
Contact us for more information about submissions.
