Mission

Consequence Forum addresses the consequences, realities, and experiences of war and geopolitical violence through literature, art, and community events. We provide the public with works and voices from around the world to promote a clearer and more nuanced understanding of what’s at stake in choosing to wage war or engage in conflict.

WHAT WE DO

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Literary Journals

A biannual anthology of international authors and artists in both print and digital formats

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Substack

Our blogging platform spotlighting guest contributors, book lists, and less-traditional work

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Online Features

New biweekly prose, poetry, and visual art, including video essays and author readings

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Of Consequence

An online series of readings, panels, and Q&As with artists and those with expertise in conflict

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Writing Workshops

Online courses that help individuals develop their creative writing craft or professional writing skills

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Partnership Opportunities

Opportunities for interns, volunteers, organizations, or those for whom cost is a participation barrier

Newest Publications and Events

Book Reviews Workshop: Oct.12th & Oct. 19th

These interrelated classes will focus on learning the basics of writing a critical book review—a review, that is, concerning itself with close reading and critical analysis instead of being solely a vehicle for sales. This goal becomes complex when writing reviews that deal with war, conflicts, and the far-reaching effects of their violence, so these classes will pay close attention to representation, appropriate language, and general practices when analyzing and writing about such complicated subjects.

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Gaza by the Sea

Fiction by Anna-Christina Schmidl

Author’s Note: “Gaza by the Sea” was inspired by true events; the characters and plot line are fictional. The story was written in the summer of 2023, prior to the outbreak of the war in October. Since then, many of the landscapes it invokes—and the lives of the people inhabiting them—have been destroyed or transformed beyond recognition; the story cannot speak to this. It is also told through the eyes of an external observer; any inaccuracies are the author’s alone.

Disruption, Disorientation, and the Slip-Slide into the Surreal (or: how best to write about the dark): Oct. 8th-Nov. 12th

When trying to navigate darkness, looking at a thing head-on will do you no good. You have to look away, slightly, from what you want to see in order to be able to see it at all—because when it comes to vision in the dark, all the power is in the peripheral. And so it is with writing about the dark. A head-on approach is rarely the best way to help the reader see, much less feel what’s there, lurking.

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“Good Evening, We are from Ukraine”: Voices of Cultural Resistance

Nonfiction by Alan Stoskopf and Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady

At first, nineteen-year-old Ilia Kashtalianov was not sure why he started painting the walls of his university dorm room in Kyiv. Once he began, he couldn’t stop.

Daybreak: A Novel by Matt Gallagher

A Review by Dewaine Farria

The notion of “the good war”—a just, nationwide effort against an obvious and perilous aggressor—pulses through Matt Gallagher’s latest novel, Daybreak (Simon & Schuster, Feb 20, 2024). This notion has perhaps been freshly reinstated in American public discourse, though Gallagher reminds us that it never ceased to throb in the veteran community—that tiny sliver of our population who fought the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) most of us ignored.

The Shadow of Our Own Bomb

Fiction by Shannon Frost Greenstein

It was a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices—we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear . . . you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb.

—Jean-Paul Sartre (1953)

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What previous contributors and attendees have to say

Phil Klay—former Marine Corps officer, National Book Award Winner, and Guggenheim Fellow

In a culture where war-making is obscured, and the costs rendered invisible, Consequence performs the essential function of highlighting the experience of war from every angle, from participants and observers, combatants and civilians, and artists of all types across international boundaries. That’s why I’m especially grateful to have been included in their pages at a time when most other journals passed on my work. If there is a way forward, it must come from the sort of thinking and humanistic engagement done in the pages of Consequence.

Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella—shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize for their translation of Natalka Bilotserkivets's Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow

Consequence Forum gives dignity to damaged and threatened communities, to lives that refuse to settle silently in the thresholds between displacement and a sense of place and self. We are grateful to include our co-translations from the Ukrainian of poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets and Halyna Kruk among other voices that rise above hard-hitting realities to hard-earned revelations.

Elliot Ackerman—former Marine Corps special operations team leader, New York Times bestselling author, and National Book Award nominee

Consequence nurtures the voices of Veterans and brings their stories to both a reading audience and an artistic community, which they have created. Finding community and being heard is what allows Veterans to reintegrate into society, making the work done by Consequence essential.