hey hey hey!
We will be doing a print run of our bi-annual zine this July! But in order to do so, we need your work!!
Deadline June 30th 🌀
Submit via our email today - [email protected]
#submissioncall #submissions #magazine #artwanted #bookstagram
Read local. Read widely. Read the stories that understand the landscapes you walk through every day. 🌾
Let me pick your next Aussie Read! 💚
Salt River Road — Molly Schmidt Tender coming-of-age fiction set in 1970s WA, exploring family, class, grief, and adolescence.
A Language of Limbs — Dylin Hardcastle Lyrical queer fiction about identity, desire, and belonging. A personal top-tier read.
Women and Children — Tony Birch A powerful, intimate portrayal of family, violence, and survival in suburban Australia.
Strangers — Belle Burden Quiet, atmospheric fiction about disconnection, proximity, and the strangeness between people.
The Natural Way of Things — Charlotte Wood A brutal feminist dystopia set in the Australian outback — control, punishment, and resistance.
Mad Mabel — Sally Hepburn A buried identity resurfaces when a woman’s past murder conviction collides with present-day suspicion.
Rytual — Chloe Elizabeth Wilson A dark satire of beauty culture where a cult-like brand pulls a young woman into something dangerous.
#bookstagram #literature #indiepress #booksbooksbooks #zine
Swamplesque 2 is joyful theatrical anarchy at its finest—the kind of show that leaves audiences wondering what on earth they just witnessed while simultaneously demanding a third instalment immediately. (It’s me. I’m the audience.)
Full article on Substack now! 🔗 in bio!
#swamplesque #australiantheatre #supportthearts #burlesque #zine
333 🌸 you & me
so very grateful!
333 - An angel number for creativity, growth, encouragement and becoming.
It feels fitting that our little corner of the internet has arrived here together.
Thank you for following, submitting, reading, sharing, interacting, and believing in this project in its earliest stages.
Rotten Fig Press was created to make space for writing and art that is vulnerable, experimental, emotionally resonant and alive - a place where emerging voices are encouraged not to rot quietly, but to bloom, fruit and feast.
Every message, submission, comment and share reminds us why this matters.
Small presses are built slowly, lovingly, and collectively - and we are so grateful for the 333 people growing alongside us.
Here’s to risk, tenderness, community, and all things fruitful and rotten.🌀✨
#writingcommunity #bookstagram #literature #writersofinstagram #artistsofinstagram
Mother’s Day 🌸
During my honours year, I wrote a thesis on the form and portrayals of maternal narrative in literature — work that unexpectedly connected two versions of myself I had so rarely seen overlap, interlacing the writer with the mother.
While researching, I came across a line from Of Woman Born that stayed with me:
“But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.”
It struck something deep in me. The identity of “mother” so often eclipses the woman beneath it — her intellect, creativity, interiority, ambition, exhaustion, desire. So much of both motherhood and authorhood feels performative at times, though often in entirely different ways; two roles asking for everything, while still expecting softness.
My thesis became an exploration of that tension: the fragmented, repetitive, beautiful and isolating realities of maternal life, and the ways literature can hold them with honesty. Not motherhood as an ideal, but as a lived and embodied experience — cyclical, contradictory, mundane, loving, exhausting, and deeply human.
Today I’m thinking of the mothers who came before me, the mothers around me, and the women beneath the title itself. 🌸
I’ve uploaded a journal article to our substack that I wrote on one of the core texts that shaped my thinking throughout this project, Mothertongues — a genre-defying, collaborative work that captures the fragmented, communal, absurd and deeply intimate textures of early motherhood. An Australian cornerstone of maternal narrative written by Eliza Bell and Ceridwen Dovey.
It’s a text that reminded me that maternal narratives do not need to be singular, polished, or idealised to be worthy of literature—the euphoric, the tragic, the shit, piss and sick covered—all motherhood is a story worth telling.
#bookstagram #motherhood #mumstagram #literature #indiepress
I LOVE MUMS! 🫶🏻💓🌸✨🎀
During my honours year I became enveloped in maternal narratives — the ways motherhood is written, performed, fragmented, idealised, resisted, and lived within literature. 🌸
I found that through this study I had unexpectedly connected two versions of myself I had so rarely seen overlap, interlacing the writer with the mother.
One of the core texts I studied was Mothertongues by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell (2022), a collaborative and genre-defying work that reshaped how I understood maternal storytelling. Through collage, absurdism, fragmented narration, and shared voice, the text resists the idea that motherhood can ever be singular, polished, or easily contained.
This journal article grew from that research and from my fascination with the intersections between motherhood, authorship, care work, performance, and feminist literary form.
A few excerpts from the piece are included in this carousel 🌸 the full extended version is live now on our substack (link in bio)
May Moodboard! 🐬🌀 I’m feeling blue (in the most positive way!) 💙🦋 What are you Manifesting for May?
I’m manifesting a May by the sea; endless cups of coffee, good company and making memories & moments of magic!
#zine #writercommunity #artcommunity #bookstagram #submissionsopen
