Act ASAP! Deadline: 21 November 2025
Call for Works from Trouble Magazine
Matthew Rose, Founder & Editor
Jamie Newton, Managing Editor & Creative Director
That is about where we find ourselves as 2025 whips our senses and sensibilities into a kind of collective vertigo. A year of fire and floods, shootings and protests, doublespeak and double dealing. Each week seems to deliver a new wave of the exhausting, the discouraging, the unnerving, the frightening. Even the quiet moments feel charged with static. The world hums with tension.
In times like these the old question rises again. What are artists for?
If we are honest, artists have always been called to shine a light on troubled times. Not with the cold glare of judgment, not with the blunt force of ideology, but with the clear, searching gaze that art makes possible. The troubled times are not coming. They are here now, pressing on every side. Which means it is time to speak up.
Trouble is not a single thing. There is good trouble, the kind that shakes loose the old calcified structures and invites renewal. There is bad trouble, the kind that corrodes trust and leaves communities fractured. There is the everyday trouble that settles into the corners of ordinary life, and the great sweeping historical trouble that reshapes entire generations. We are living through them all at once.
For artists, trouble is not only a crisis. It is also material.
We stare into it because we have to. We turn it over because meaning hides in the places that others look away from. We search for the symbolic patterns, the emotional truth inside the chaos, the human face obscured by headlines. Trouble asks us to look deeper and to find the language, the image, the form that lets others see what they could not see before.
This is why the creative community feels so vital in a year like this one. From Europe to Asia, South America to the United States, everyone is carrying their own version of the story. Everyone is grappling with their own collisions of hope and despair. And all of us are being shaped by one global weather system of disruption.
TROUBLE No. 10 is an invitation to answer that moment. Not with resignation. Not with cynicism. With the courage to name what you see. With the clarity that comes only from making. With the stubborn belief that art can hold complexity without collapsing into despair.
We want your take. Your lens. Your witness. Your refusal to look away.
These times are difficult, but they are also asking something of us. To rise to the work. To illuminate what has been obscured. To let trouble sharpen our vision and deepen our commitment to truth, beauty, and the fragile human heart.
Everything depends on what we choose to make of it.
A Call to the Troubled and the True
The hour is restless, the world is unsteady, and artists everywhere are feeling the tremor beneath their feet. If there were ever a moment to speak clearly, to reveal what presses upon the heart, it is now. Which is why we are opening the doors wide and asking you to send the work that trouble has carved into you.
Send us what you see:
the trouble in your street, your neighborhood, your country. The trouble in the forests that burn and the oceans that warm. The trouble in the skies that no longer look like the skies you remember. Send the trouble that keeps you awake. Send the trouble you carry quietly.
Do not tidy it. Do not soften it. Make it true, not pretty.
Politics, religion, climate, civil life, public health. The intimate trouble of a single family, or the vast trouble of a culture stumbling through upheaval. Your personal story is not too small. Your righteous anger is not too large. If it has shaken you, if it has demanded a response from your spirit, then it belongs here.
We welcome every form:
art, photography, collage, poem, story, painting, sculpture (photographed), any shape your honesty takes.
How to send:
One JPG at 300 dpi, plus a single line with your name, the title of the work, and either your Instagram handle or your website.
For written pieces, a maximum of 250 words in 11 point type.
We are aiming for two hundred works. Lean. Urgent. Fierce. Voices from every direction.
Deadline: 21 November 2025
Submit to: troublemagazine2025@gmail.com
What is troubling you right now?
Say it. Show it. Put it into the world while the world is still listening.