New Alchemy

Introducing our 2019 New Alchemy winner...

 
 

 

 
Swarm, Text by Mary Haidri, Artwork by Melissa Gordon

 

 

Swarm title page

Swarm inner cover and credits

Illustration of women holding a honeycomb

Table setting and poem in black and yellow

Three women with bees emerging from their open mouths

Red and black illustration of women and fire

Woman hunched over a table

A hand in a honeycomb clenching a black piece of fabric

Children hatched in honeycombs

Bees flying out of a burning honeycomb

 

 

What is New Alchemy?

 

We at Permafrost put out a call for new and innovative approaches to the creative process. We asked for your experiments: with language, with plot, with format, with medium. We wanted to read/see/hear your most exciting and daring projects, your collaborations, your darlings that don’t fit anywhere else, your basement-dwelling monsters revealed in all their grotesquery onto the medium of your choice. Anything went. Thus, New Alchemy was born.

 

Simple line drawing of an alchemy symbol with a circle in a square in a triangle in a circle

 

Browse Other Winners

 

2020 New Alchemy Winner: Purple Forbidden Enclosure
2018 New Alchemy Winner: Sand Wildflowers
2017 New Alchemy Winner: User Reviews of Medication
2016 New Alchemy Winner: Go Nowhereing