Taking Submissions: Strange Pilgrims, First Window

Deadline: November 30th, 2025
Payment: $200 for long-form, $50 for flash
Theme: Surreal, speculative, and fabulist stories; unhinged, lyric, and fragmented essays; voice-driven experimental narratives and slow-burn realism; cultural and literary criticism; hyper-intellectual riffs and children’s stories

Our first ever submission period runs from September 21—November 30. We can’t wait to read you real, surreal & brutally beautiful writing!

Submission Guidelinesજ⁀➴ ✉︎

We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world.

Multiple submissions are not allowed. Please only make one submission (whether that’s a story, essay, OR flash piece) at a time. After you’ve heard back from us, you may submit again right away if you wish to.

Simultaneous submissions are fine — just let us know immediately (via email) if your work is accepted elsewhere.

We do not currently accept previously published works. Self-published pieces (on your blog, Substack, etc.), however, are welcome.

Submissions are always free for general categories. If you’d like to support our magazine, you can become a paid subscriber via our Substack, leave a tip, or request paid editorial feedback. These options help us sustain the magazine and pay our writers.

You’ll hear back within 4 months. We also offer a $10 Fast Response option, wherein we’ll respond within 4 weeks.

We nominate for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net.

We offer payment to all our contributors:

ꫂ❁ $200 per short story/essay

⋆✮ $50 per flash piece

Payments are made via PayPal within one week of publication.

We publish one piece a week, alternating between flash and long-form writing.

Short Stories (up to 5000 words)

Essays / Narrative Nonfiction (up to 5000 words)

Flash Fiction (under 1000 words)

Flash CNF (under 1000 words)

We’re not married to any genre, structure, or subject. We love surreal, speculative, and fabulist stories; unhinged, lyric, and fragmented essays; voice-driven experimental narratives and slow-burn realism; cultural and literary criticism; hyper-intellectual riffs and children’s stories — so long as they move. If your work is honest, well-crafted, and offers something emotionally and intellectually vivid, we want to read it.

Some of the writers who guide our taste: Gabriel García Márquez, Susanna Clarke, Toni Morrison, Brian Doyle, Han Kang, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis, Roland Barthes, Franz Kafka, James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Geetanjali Shree, Leo Tolstoy, Mariana Enriquez, David Foster Wallace, Lidia Yuknavitch, Chuck Palahniuk, Clarice Lispector, Ted Chiang, Ali Smith, Milan Kundera, Saadat Hasan Manto, Karen Russell, Fernando Pessoa, and many, many others.

Our Editorial Style -ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

We edit lightly and collaboratively. If we accept your piece, we may suggest small changes for clarity, flow, or line-level polish, but we only take on work that already feels complete and carefully revised.

We ask for first serial rights and the right to archive your piece on our website (and, hopefully in time, in a print anthology). All rights revert to you upon publication. If your piece is reprinted elsewhere, we’d love an acknowledgement of Strange Pilgrims as the original publisher.

About Our Submission Portal 𓇢𓆸

We’ve built this cool little portal through Tally. Since we’re new and scrappy, we wanted to see if we could do something without the biggest name in the game when it comes to taking submissions (ahem, Submittable)