'Noice' Anthology - What Do We Mean by 'Love and Art as Resistance'?
(A guide for contributors who aren’t sure where to start)
When we put out the call for love and art as forms of resistance, we got a few messages that all said a version of the same thing: I love this idea but… I’m not sure my story fits. There are just too many options. What if…
If you felt like that, this is for you.
First things first:
Resistance doesn’t have to look like a protest
Resistance is what happens when a person refuses to stop being human in conditions that are designed to strip that away.
It’s a grandmother teaching her granddaughter the language that was once illegal to speak. It’s two people falling in love across a border that insists they shouldn’t exist near each other. It’s a community garden planted in a lot the city wrote off. It’s a teenager drawing on her arm in class because creating something—anything—is the only way she knows how to survive the day.
None of these are dramatic in the Hollywood sense. All of them are acts of profound defiance.
This anthology isn’t looking for stories where love defeats an oppressive system. It’s looking for stories where love endures despite one. Where art persists. Where connection refuses to be severed even when everything is working to sever it.
What counts as “love” here?
All of it.
Romantic love, sexual love, love that’s messy and complicated and not easily named
Parental love, filial love, the grief of missing someone who was taken
Chosen family — the people who become your people when the people who were supposed to be your people couldn’t or wouldn’t
Community love — the neighbor who brings food, the stranger who drives you to the clinic, the group chat that keeps people sane
Love of place — the home you were displaced from, the home you made somewhere new, the patch of ground that means something
Self-love — which is sometimes the hardest act of resistance of all
What counts as “art” here?
Creation in any form. The song someone sings to stay calm. The story a parent tells to explain the inexplicable to a child. The mural painted on a wall that keeps getting whitewashed. The journal. The letters. The embroidery. The act of writing this submission.
Art doesn’t have to be capital-A Art to be resistance. It just has to be making something—insisting that beauty and meaning belong to you, regardless of what a system says.
It doesn’t even HAVE to be ‘love & art’ at the same time, it can be just one or the other.
Micro-prompts to jog your mind:
These aren’t constraints, just ideas. Be inspired by one, or use them to find your own.
A room where people are safe. What does it feel like inside? Who made it safe, and how, and at what cost? Who do they let in?
Two people who should not, according to some authority, be together. A border. A classification. A law. A family. They are together anyway. What does that look like on an ordinary Tuesday?
Something beautiful made in a terrible place. A song in a detention center. A garden on a rooftop in a city that’s hostile to its residents. A love letter written in secret. What does making it cost? What does it give back?
A language that nearly died. Someone speaks it, or sings it, or teaches it to a child who doesn’t want to learn it yet. The child will want to later.
The thing they couldn’t take. A memory. A recipe. A way of moving through the world. Something intangible that survived displacement, imprisonment, loss. How does the character carry it? How do they pass it on?
Chosen family at a table. It doesn’t have to be a dinner table. It can be a Discord server, a corner of a park, a van on a highway. Who is there, and why did they choose each other, and what does the ordinary texture of that love feel like?
After. Not during the crisis, but after. The unglamorous, grinding, tender work of surviving it. What does love look like when the emergency is over and the long middle begins?
Art as the thing that keeps someone alive. The specific music, story, image, or act of creation that a character returns to when that’s the only thing they can do. What is it? Why that?
The inheritance. Something passed down through generations that the system tried to interrupt. How does it arrive? What shape is it in?
A small defiance. Not a revolution. Not a manifesto. The quiet, specific, daily acts of refusing to be less than human. Someone wears the color they were told not to wear. Someone uses their name, their real name, in a place that wants another. Someone makes a joke and everyone laughs, and for a moment the weight is off.
A note on scope
The anthology will be raising funds for immigration justice, but the theme is bigger than one issue on purpose — because resistance takes many forms, and the people who need to tell (and read) these stories exist across many communities and many experiences.
You don’t have to write about immigration to belong here. If you’re writing about LGBTQ+ survival, disability justice, racial justice, anti-authoritarian defiance, or any other experience of marginalization where love and art become acts of survival — you belong here.
What holds all of it together —all of us together— is the orientation: toward connection, toward creating, toward persisting. Toward doing the human thing, and being the human thing, even when systems are doing their best to deny us.
Still not sure your idea fits?
Send us a message. A sentence about your idea is enough — we’ll tell you if we think it fits, and if we think it doesn’t, we’ll tell you that too, kindly and quickly.
Or join the Noice discord Channel.
The Organizers
Morgan A.Drake — Epic Fantasy & Dark Speculative Fiction Author
Ed the Editor — Editor & Speculative Fiction Author
For questions and inquiries send us a message.
Share This Project
Know a writer, artist, musician, narrator, or reader who believes in love and art as resistance?
Get them involved!
NOICE is a volunteer-run charity anthology. All proceeds go to immigration justice organizations. Contributors keep full rights to their work.