Mayhem Literary Journal

About Mayhem Literary Journal

Mayhem is a literary journal showcasing creative writing by students, staff and alumni of the University of Waikato. The emphasis is on creative work with a “capacity to seize the reader’s senses,” and each of Mayhem's issues contain a selection of poems, memoir, personal essays and short fiction, ranging from lyric to comic, political to personal, poignant to explosive.

The Mayhem app has taken all the articles from the Mayhem website (http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/mayhem/index.shtml), and packaged them in to a mobile device friendly format, where you can either browse at your leisure, or have a quick read from a randomly chosen article.

Mayhem wants its readers to encounter “the power of a fine piece of writing to warm the skin of the heart, chill the back of the brain, to use language to color outside the lines, to deepen, complicate, invert, irradiate our view of the world and our fragile selves within it,” and the journal welcomes contributions of creative work to add to its “online gallery of voices.”

Mayhem editor Dr Tracey Slaughter, talks about how, "sometimes the page is a mess. The sentences won’t hold their weight. The characters stiffen and hide their faces, or stand at centre stage and shriek. The plot takes corners you can’t follow, a dark figure with back turned, distant steps. The set is a series of shadows, or postcards of overused plastic towns. The voice sounds lifted from an answering machine – or an emergency room. The mood floods, or flat lines. The words tick, bloodless, from left to right. Or animals appear in the alphabet, things with raw faces that make shapes of pain and bare their teeth. The page goes into spasm. The page goes into stasis. You spend days staring down the vanishing point of the mess. But mess is good. Mess is learning. The writer needs permission to make a mess."

Dr Tracey Slaughter lectures in Creative Writing in the English Programme at the University of Waikato. Her work has won numerous awards including the 2010 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary, and the 2004 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Her collection of poems and short stories entitled "her body rises" was published by Random House.

Please note that Mayhem is seeking submissions of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, and will be releasing at least one issue each year.