Callithump! Wants You!

Callithump! needs artists, poets, and other creative types to share their work through toy capsule vending machines.

We’ll make it worth your while!

We just can’t say exactly how...

Here’s the thing... We’ve wanted to put out a call for submissions for a long time. We firmly believe that creatives should be rewarded for their hard work. However, the nature of Callithump! makes it hard to say what that reward should be. If we were a fledgling print publication, payment would be in contributors copies. If we were a successful print publication, we’d pay in real money! With Callithump! a “copy” doesn’t have the same parameters as a print publication does. We deliberately vary the amount of any given item in the capsules. Sometimes a capsule can contain a unique item, only available in that one capsule. Sometimes they’re as many as fifty copies of the same thing in a single vending machine.

To further complicate matters, we want to be open to every kind of submission. For example, Kati McCarthy gave us a digital file of several of her poems. These we took, printed out very tiny, made nice little envelopes for them so you’d kind of get the feeling of someone mailing a poem just to you. On the other hand, Contance Pavliska gave us fully completed artworks, already packaged and ready to be put in capsules. Should we be rewarding Constance a lot more than Kati?

Or we could just be paying cash, but honestly, we’re beyond non-profit. We actually spend more money to keep this running than we take in. It’s okay. We never went into this intending to make money! But that’s just one way we can’t reward our contributors. Not yet.

Anyway, we haven’t figured out how to reward you for contributing, and that’s been keeping us from putting out any proper calls for submissions. But we want you. We need you! We want to grow, and have more Callithump! vending machines in more locations. Right now, however, it’s almost entirely Matt and Jess and they’re maxed out with just the three machines that are going right now. Plus, it’s not much of a parade with just two people. This will be much more fun, interesting and rewarding with more people involved!

So, I’m going to turn the question over to you, dear potential contributor! What would make contributing worthwhile for you?

Answer here. We’re open to ideas!



Why Contribute?

Creativity should be unhindered and without limits. Yeah, that sounds nice. Really, much of the best work comes from operating within strict limits. You can’t push the boundaries when there are no boundaries!




We’re looking for most any sort of creativity that can be enclosed within a 2-inch capsule toy vending machine capsule. This can include poetry, photographs, paintings, or anything else that’s small, or can be folded or crushed to fit that space.









We try for a “standard vending machine distribution” of things. That is, you put in your 50 cents, generally you get an item that feels like 50 cents worth of something. Sometimes you’ll get something that seems of far greater value, and sometimes you’ll feel ripped off.