The Mission of Narrative Magazine is to advance literary art in the digital age. From Narrative’s website:
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2003, Narrative is dedicated to advancing literary arts in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging readership across generations, in schools, and around the globe. Our online library of new literature by celebrated authors and by the best new and emerging writers is available for free.
Vision: to connect writers and readers around the globe.
Narrative welcomes submissions of previously unpublished manuscripts of all lengths, ranging from short short stories to complete book-length works for serialization. Narrative regularly publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including stories, novels, novel excerpts, novellas, personal essays, humor, sketches, memoirs, literary biographies, commentary, reportage, interviews, and features of interest to readers who take pleasure in storytelling and imaginative prose.
Narrative looks for quality and originality of language and content. In addition to submissions for issues of Narrative Magazine itself, we also encourage submissions for our Story of the Week, literary contests, and Readers’ Narratives. Please read Submission Guidelines for all information on manuscript formatting, word lengths, author payment, and other policies.
Marlene Musings: It occurs to me, my dear writing friends, that your writing just might qualify for publication in Narrative Magazine. What have you got to lose? Submit!
Ke11y
When I was seven I found a five-pound note, I bought my mother flowers, and myself a cardboard circus. I have it to this day. It has seven animals and a circus ringmaster dressed in red.
I am an aviator, a musician, a runaway exile. I found my world in illusion because reality was always so hard, but now that distant illusion is my reality. I have lived a kind of wandering childhood, always certain the playground ended, but never finding the boundary. I went my way in a world of human comedy, as much wisdom as chaos, and not much between. My stories, kept in the attic of my mind, seared down my veins into my fingers, with no experience to fall back on. I was a writer walking down the page in clogs!
They tell me that writing is a ‘gift’ but of course this is not true, ‘imagination’ is. To see something of value in a rose trampled underfoot, to create a warm morning in London on a February day, or to make a compass needle quiver south. For a long time I wondered why people saw me as an enigma, someone to be concerned about, not to be understood, while I understood myself to be valueless and unimportant. That’s why I like to write, because writing gives me an outside view of myself. I can today sit in a tree staring down at a boy writing in his bed, tapping the keys of his first typewriter, so quietly as not to disturb anyone.
Illusion is most definitely my reality.
mcullen Post author
I’m taking a deep breath, Kelly, and sighing with satisfaction at your writing that is so good, it’s like being embraced in the soft folds of Pashima wrap. I like how you take a fact, a visual image that the reader can see, then go deep to the inner world of the narrator with such honest, such genuineness that one can’t help but appreciate the narrator for sharing that depth of discovery.
“always certain the playground ended, but never finding the boundary.”
“I was a writer walking down the page in clogs!”and the last two paragraphs = excellent and memorable writing.