Call for Submissions: The Walldog

April 18, 2025

What Is The Walldog?

The Walldog is a critical arts writing and research platform grounded in Waterloo Region, Ontario, with a focus on the Waterloo-Wellington corridor. A "wall dog" was the name given to the industrial sign painters who, often precariously and anonymously, scaled buildings to hand-paint massive advertisements across North America. Traces of their work remain in ghost signs that still cling to the region’s industrial architecture. The Walldog reframes this figure to honour overlooked histories of aesthetic labour, craft, and cultural memory.

We approach arts criticism as a practice of cultural witnessing and speculative repair. Our work is informed by Black radical traditions that foreground mutual care, opacity, and insurgent memory, and by Indigenous epistemologies that centre relational geographies—rooted in land, story, and resurgence. We read public art, ghost signs, murals, textiles, protest aesthetics, and vernacular design as openings into submerged histories and yet-to-be-imagined futures.

Engaging the framework of potential histories, we understand these cultural traces not as static artifacts, but as rehearsals—unfinished and ongoing—through which ancestral knowledge, obscured pasts, and suppressed lineages might be reaccessed or reactivated.

Through essays, visual interventions, interviews, and collaborative projects, The Walldog creates space for stories and aesthetic traditions obscured by dominant narratives of innovation and progress. We centre the creative and political contributions of artists, cultural workers, and communities whose practices have been undervalued by institutional art worlds—those who make and remake life in the hyper-local context of Waterloo Region, transforming walls, streets, and margins into sites of resistance and possibility.

In the spirit of Textile’s commitment to place-based storytelling and community dialogue, The Walldog looks not only backward, but sideways and forward—holding space for what has been, what was lost, and what still might be.

What We're Looking For

We welcome submissions from writers, artists, and community members. Your piece should connect to the arts, culture, or creative communities in the region. We're open to a wide range of formats and perspectives:

Reviews of exhibitions, performances, books, films, or other cultural events (500–1,000 words)
Conversations/interviews with artists, curators, or cultural workers (1,000–2,500 words)
Essays and reflections on artistic practices, personal experience, or regional cultural trends (1,000–2,000 words)
Artist-written pieces exploring creative process, influence, context, or aesthetic lineage (500–1,500 words)

We are especially interested in work that is experimental, critical, grounded in place, and that challenges dominant narratives of “innovation” or “progress.”

Compensation

$400 for essays and long-form pieces (1,000-2,500 words)
$200 for reviews and shorter reflections (500-1,000 words)

Submission guidelines

We accept both pitches and unpublished drafts. We do not accept previously published pieces.

Your submission should clearly communicate how your piece connects to the arts or culture of the Waterloo-Wellington region. If it’s not immediately clear, please explain your approach in a brief note—we welcome creative interpretations, but regional relevance is essential.

We welcome submissions that engage with the arts, culture, and communities across this diverse region.

How to submit

Send your pitch or draft to textilekw@gmail.com with:

Subject line: WALLDOG SUBMISSION: [Your Name or Submission Title]

Please include:

A short summary (max 250 words) describing your piece and key themes
How the piece connects to the Waterloo-Wellington arts scene
Estimated or actual word count
A brief bio (max 100 words), including your connection to the region
For pitches: 1–2 writing samples or links to previous work (optional but helpful)

If you’ve experienced barriers to publication or come from an underrepresented community in arts publishing, feel free to mention this in your bio (optional). We are committed to supporting diverse voices.

Sample pitch

A skeleton

Hi Team Texile,

I hope you’re keeping well! I had an idea I thought you might be interested in for The Walldog, a project of Textile.

It’s about [one sentence here, as intriguing as humanly possible]. Details are below. A little about me: [your qualifications/past bylines]. I’ve included links to a couple of my clips below, too. Could you let me know what you think of this idea, when you have a chance? I’d love to chat with you more about it.

Thanks so much for your time,

[You]

Pitch

Paragraph one: Open with a quick scene—paint a picture of a person, a situation. Write it as though you’re writing the opener of your story.

Paragraph two: What is unfolding here? Connect the scene to the broader narrative. Briefly go over the arc of events here. What is happening?

Paragraph three: What is the context, data, additional info that supports where you’re taking us? And what kind of access do you have?

Paragraph four: Introduce the ideas-plot. What does this story tap into thematically? What does it tell us about being human?

Links:

[Clip 1]

[Clip 2]

Priority Reading Dates

We invite pitches and drafts on a rolling basis, though submissions received by the following dates will receive priority consideration:

Fall 2025 Issue: May 23, 2025
Winter 2026 Issue: October 23, 2025

You’re welcome to pitch pieces about upcoming exhibitions, performances, or events—just let us know the timeline in your proposal.

Publication is subject to available funding, and we aim to respond within three weeks.