An Origins Tale

Journal Information & Contact

Chant de la Sirène first began as a weblog in 2007 by Laura Hinton on the topic of the hybrid literary arts in New York City. It focused on the radical New York poetry experiment & its multi-media arts scene through which Hinton had been floating in and out for many years. This original blog published Hinton’s writings and interviews, as well as a series of guest writers, on the topic of hybridity in contemporary literature. It came to contain a wider array of poetry book reviews, artist-poet dialogues, poet tributes and memorials, conference travelogues, even occasional memoir essays.

Chant de la Sirène the Blog continued its presence on the world wide web until the spring of 2020, when—under duress from the Covid19 Pandemic—its Google domain was snatched from this digital environment by its own paid host. This massive US company controlling the internet, which physically squats on an enormous “campus” on the shores of the San Francisco Bay mid-peninsula destroying parts of Hinton’s beloved marshy Baylands, refused to offer a simple mechanism to accept Hinton’s tiny payment for the annual domain subscription. Lacking funding during the pandemic, the neglected blog site eventually passed out to sea, like digital sewage from a bad yacht running on evil corporate winds. Then, this original domain was grabbed up by those figures we call the domain snatchers, the pirates of the worldwide web who purchase seemingly abandoned web sites for cheap in order to reap huge profits by forcing caring owners to pay high captive ransoms. Held hostage by Go Daddy, kind of like Odysseus under the spell of the singing sirens, Hinton refused to pay hundreds of dollars to hostage-takers.

She took her sirens back. Out of Google’s catastrophic pandemic wreckage and lack of customer service call centers, a new domain was born—Chant de la Sirène, the Journal.

The original Odyssey never ended up in Ithaca. But the sirens who so plagued our Male Hero have been re-conceived into this journal. It is rebuilt, viewed through French transliteration, and—through the art of bricolage—made into a more fulsome journal format that is published somewhat infrequently but nevertheless in style.

While each issue is compiled around a special theme, the writers and multi-media artists published in Chant de la Sirène, the Journal are selected for creative work that follows their own siren-inspired mis/directions and outlier currents. As goddess of enchantment and deviance, Circe promises Odysseus, her lost wayfarer:

When your crew have taken you past these Sirens,

I cannot give you coherent directions as to which

of two courses you are to take...

Chant de la Sirène is published approximately once a year but with no set schedule. We call for work months in advance for each themed issue. We do not read unsolicited manuscripts, only those sent per announced themed deadlines to the submissions email. Our contact for submissions sent per published calendar topic is:

chantdelasirenesubmissions@gmail.com

You can also praise and rant and rave about the journal on this email address.

Please be generous with response time, as our sirens (unpaid staff of one) are often out at sea making trouble for other seafarers around the world. We DO love feedback and reviews. If you wish to reach us, you can contact editor Laura Hinton.

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Top photograph, Laura Hinton: Ancient Roman fresco that hangs in the National Roman Museum of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome (December 2019)

We hope you enjoy reading Chant de la Sirène the Journal, now four years old as of 2024. Note that previous posts from Chant de la Sirène the Blog were not entirely lost at sea, thanks to heroic internet archivists who refuse to listen to perverse corporate logic. Oldies from the original CDLS blog will be uploaded from time to time, available by clicking on the Chant de la Sirène Blog Selected Archives link below (see yellow footer strip).

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Feel free to write us, especially if you like us! Submission periods and upcoming deadlines are listed periodically on our “Future Issues” page and by email.

Again, no unsolicited work except in response to published calls for work. Thank you!