In the stifling air of summer 2026, when Something Other published the call-out for our fourteenth chapter, On Ritual, time felt at a standstill. Two elections a decade earlier had unleashed a lava flow of violence that scorched the landscape and solidified. Change did not seem near.
And yet, as we begin to publish the chapter, shifts are actually perceptible. Student movements are shaping new political ecologies, voters have rejected authoritarian control, convictions of sexual assault are trickling in. All the result of slow, persistent, collective work, for a future that isn’t guaranteed. We watch the nights drawing in. War in its various shapes rages on. The taste of fear stains our tongues.
Ritual can do so much in moments this charged, creating space for the complicated feelings of grief, hope, uncertainty, desire that arise. We shared this call-out across the margins within which Something Other exists, and have been deeply moved by the response, the ways in which the ideas we raised resounded, resulting in more submissions than can fit neatly into a single chapter.
If something of ritual is in the air, in the lungs, then we want each submission to have space to breathe. So we’re publishing On Ritual in two parts, each a bookend to our in-person gathering on 19 November 2026, where some of the rituals will be performed live.
Alexandra Baybutt projects us forward in time, with a series of rituals for remembering and imagining between 2026 and 2036. Her text dwells in the inbetweens, the pauses, and what might be shaped within them. Working in a different way, Eirini Kartsaki’s short essay Only the cicadas will save us acts as a travelogue of moving through the edges.
Alice Gale-Feeny’s reading ritual, a stage set presents books as nooks and shelters: “tents, dens, bobs, wigs, places of worship and model towns” in which it’s possible to commune. Susan Rudy casts the kitchen as such a space in her short essay I meant to write ‘ritual’ and wrote ‘dishes’ instead, which takes pleasure in the slippage between the work of theory and domesticity, queer refusals and collective acceptance.
Recitations of an Art Practice is a snapshot of Olivia du Vergier’s ongoing practice of speaking out loud whilst navigating the every day; a performance score as ritual, a spell to mark the present, a rehearsal, of sorts. The moon appears here, as it does in Liliana Gelman’s Luna, presented as a visual haiku.
In her poetic invocation, Siobhán Fergus Evans offers a ritual for making a haunted house a home, while our own Maddy Costa attempts a series of spells in ‘Our Broken Bonds’, casting back and over what is found or lost between a mother and a daughter. Love and grief ricochet across the poem ‘Red Delicious’ poems by Catherin Violante, rich with imagery and myth.
Alan Fielden’s Pet is presented here as a work-in-progress, a text for three voices that will be brought to life at the live gathering on 19 November, performed by Alan himself alongside Frey Kwa Hawking and Nat Norland. As Something Other turns its face to its second decade, we remind ourselves of the necessity of gathering in person, building connections, thinking and working together, against all odds.
