Moxy is a creative nonfiction magazine. What exactly do we mean by this? The term itself is a bit of a fudge, vague enough to absorb any nonfiction deemed ‘literary’ enough by cultural gatekeepers. Our understanding of it, and hence the kind of work we’re looking for, can be defined more narrowly: every piece should have a nonfiction basis, while foregrounding stylistic techniques as well as the precise attention to detail usually associated with fiction writers. To show you what we mean, let’s take a look at a few concrete examples across different subgenres. 

TRAVEL WRITING

‘The Snow in Ghana’ by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński opens in a Ghanese village, as the author is quizzed on his mother-country by the locals. We love how, unlike run-of-the-mill travel journalism, this piece does not begin with a generalisation along the lines of ‘Ghana is a land of contrasts,’ or a cursory sketch of the political situation, but like a novel or short story, opens in medias res, with the action underway and the reader trusted to work out who is who. It uses a simple touristic conversation, which takes place during a break for repairs, to illustrate much wider political realities about the colonisation of Ghana and, implicitly, of Poland. The article relies on the strength of drama, rather than abstract analysis, which we think is essential for any creative nonfiction piece discussing political, economic, or historical concepts.

MEMOIR

We have chosen Geoff Dyer’s essay ‘Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with particular reference to Doughnut Plant doughnuts)’ because it stands out from so many memoirs in its humourousness. The idea of using an obsession with finding the perfect doughnut and coffee as a way to hint at larger ideas, ideas of home, foreignness, habit, of being stuck in a rut and getting out of it, is brilliant. Not only is it full of fantastic jokes, observations and encounters, but its long Thomas-Bernhard-influenced sentences actually embody its main themes: repetition, going out of one’s way for ultimately trivial purposes, circling back to the same destination. Rather than focusing on obviously serious or important moments of your life, we urge writers to think like novelists or poets, and use small moments typically overlooked to gesture at larger themes.

ESSAY

Andrea Long Chu’s ‘On Liking Women’ synthesizes memoir, theory, close-reading, and thorough historical and cultural analysis to produce an essay that puts the personal and the global into dialogue, challenging accepted conclusions about the nature of desire and progressive feminist tenets. Though Chu is part of an academic tradition, her prose is personal, incisive, and frequently stunning – never unwieldy or weighted down by jargon. We think this essay is exceptional in the way that it steers the reader through Chu’s own complicated history with gender and sexuality without becoming purely confessional and self-indulgent. Perhaps most importantly, the essay never delivers an easy way out to the tensions it probes. It is clear that Chu is still grappling with questions about her own identity, and that her own reading (and re-reading) has informed her personal development. We’d like to see such criticism that is provocative, genre-bending, and above all else creative.

ART CRITICISM

Like Chu’s essay, Zadie Smith’s ‘Getting In and Out’ synthesizes several genres. It is at once a review of the film Get Out, a critique of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, a discussion of the author’s own racial identity, and a reflection on depictions of racialized violence more generally. We admire Smith’s agility in moving between these forms, and between the different registers they each demand. She fluidly includes other thinkers such as James Baldwin without seeming stilted or overly academic. She continually questions her own assumptions and point of view, an openness uniquely accommodated by the essay form, and which we’d love to see in our submissions. 

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As you can see, there’s a huge range of styles and subject matters across (and within) just these four articles. Further examples of pieces we’ve enjoyed include: ‘Altered States’ by Oliver Sacks, ‘Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston’ by Jia Tolentino, ‘Cult of the Literary Sad Woman’ by Leslie Jamison, ‘Pyongyang’s Missing Millions’ by Andrew Lowry, ‘A Place in the Country’ by WG Sebald, and ‘Take a Photo Here’ by Teju Cole. 

We’d love to see a similar range and encourage you to send us pieces that are unusual and that you can’t imagine fitting easily into the boxes of other publications. Successful pieces are likely to show what the four above have in common: a style tailored to the subject matter, a focus on unexpected details, and a distinctive point of view. 

Thank you for reading our submissions guidelines and we hope to hear from you soon!