Last September, as a corollary to my association with A Motley Vision and sensing a lack of critical (as in the literary sense) approaches to Stephenie Meyer, her work, and their cultural connections in the general Twilight discourse, I started to put together (with Laura Craner's editing help and William Morris' technical assistance) an online, open access literary anthology in an effort to bridge that gap. It's called Reading Until Dawn and can be found here. I've been doing some updating in the past few weeks and getting some essays lined up, and I think it's about ready to fly.

So I'm sending out this call (as I did on AMV back in September):

Knowing that there are people out there who can bring critical insight and textually supported readings to this conversation, we're extending an invitation for critical essays to be published in the expansive, open-ended anthology, subtitled "The Persistence of Stephenie Meyer." Whether you consider yourself academic or amateur, you can submit as many essays as you want.

We're looking for well-written essays that thoughtfully explore the Twilight novels and their cultural reception and that contribute critical dimensions to our understanding of Meyer's work and her place in contemporary American, world, and even, since Meyer has been so open about her Mormon-ness, Latter-day Saint culture and literature. Contributors need not be LDS or be major fans (or detractors) of Meyer's work. We're simply looking for submissions that say something interesting about the novels.

If you're interested in contributing (or know someone who might be), please refer to the "Introduction" (ugly URL at the end of this message) to catch scent of our rationale and submit your essays (of between 2,500 and 5,000 words, in Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect format, and according to MLA bibliographic guidelines) to me at readinguntildawn [at] gmail [dot] com. Please include a brief bio statement to be published with your essay.

The essays for the anthology will be published as they're accepted on an ongoing basis.

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Main site: http://motleyvision.org/readinguntildawn

Introduction: http://www.motleyvision.org/readinguntildawn/ojs/index.php?journal=readinguntildawn&page=article&op=view&path[]=1&path[]=10

Reading Until Dawn: The Blog (for updates and other housekeeping issues): http://readinguntildawn.wordpress.com/

I enjoyed the essay, and hope to be able to contribute one of my own eventually.

Thanks for providing the RUD forum, Tyler.