Welcome back to our crash course on the lit theory we wish we had actually learned in our MFA.

Okay, first off, here’s part 1:

And yes, we sent that out a while ago and then well, things got insanely busy round here. In fact, as I type this I’m sitting amid a living room overflowing with moving boxes because we’re moving back to Canada in just a few days (!!). So you can imagine that life is still very very busy. And yet, I didn’t want y’all to feel like I totally dropped the ball on this because, ahem, I didn’t. I’ve been working on this for months.

So, below is part 2.1. Yes, you read that right. 2.1. Because things are about to get ultra-nerdy, friends, and I want to give this out in chunks. My rough draft for this second unit was over 15,000 words (!!).

This unit on VOICE, CONSCIOUSNESS & DISTANCE will have four lessons:

1. Narrator & Focalizer ← today

2. Distance: Showing vs. Telling

3. Modes of Consciousness

4. The Unreliable Narrator

We’ll send them out every couple weeks along with writing exercises for each. As with the first unit, everything will be free to read but will eventually become paywalled like some of our archive (the stories and essays we publish will always remain 100% free to read, but because these lessons take a whole lot of work from us, we’re deciding to paywall them after the initial free send).

Paid subscribers can also access the writing exercises connected with each lesson. This is Part 1’s:

Alright, let’s get started.

Today we’re tackling the topic of VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.

And the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every failure in writing is a failure of voice.

The accompanying writing exercises will let you try each of these techniques in your own prose. Here’s they are for today’s unit:

Unit II: Voice, Consciousness, & Distance

Lesson I: Narrator & Focalizer

For most of the twentieth century, critics talked about point of view as if it were one thing. Was the story told in first person or third? Limited or omniscient? Fixed or roving? But French literary critic Gérard Genette noticed that point of view was actually two questions glued together.

Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:

When you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from the agent who speaks.

A first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was — seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into sentences.

Gérard Genette gave us three positions of focalization, let’s dive into them.

1.

Zero/ Free Focalization

With zero or free focalization, the narrative isn’t tethered to any single consciousness. Rather, the narrator perceives and knows more than any character. This is what we used to call omniscience — think the 19th-century novel’s expansiveness, Tolstoy moving freely between Anna’s interior and Vronsky’s to narrators who can comment on history, weather, the secret thoughts of strangers passing on the street and so on.

Gérard Genette coined this term because he wanted to move past terms that were “too specifically visual.” He felt this for a lot of the terms we use in lit theory (point of view, angle, perspective, field of experience, etc.). But characters aren’t exclusively seeing, are they? They also hear, smell, feel, think, remember, intuit… So, this term was his attempt to account for everything a consciousness does.

Genette borrows Tzvetan Todorov’s formula to describe this position2:

Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters knows).

Wayne Booth’s term for this is privilege.3 Here he is on what it means, how rare its complete form is, and why even the novel that seems to disappear into its characters can't actually escape it:

Observers and narrator-agents, whether self-conscious or not, reliable or not, commenting or silent, isolated or supported, can be either privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly natural means or limited to realistic vision and inference. Complete privilege is what we usually call omniscience. But there are many kinds of privilege, and very few “omniscient” narrators are allowed to know or show as much as their authors know. […] Our roving visitation into the minds of sixteen characters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, seeing nothing but what those minds contain, may seem in one sense not to depend on an omniscient author. But this method is omniscience with teeth in it: the implied author demands our absolute faith in his powers of divination. We must never for a moment doubt that he knows everything about each of these sixteen minds or that he has chosen correctly how much to show of each. In short, impersonal narration is really no escape from omniscience — the true author is as “unnaturally” all-knowing as he ever was.

Watch it happen in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, page 56:

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed and that…

So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her arms, tipping her foot up and down as though she were by her own fender in Pimlico, while Emily Coates ranged over the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd increased. Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing — poor women waiting to see the Queen go past — poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War — tut-tut — actually had tears in his eyes.

A different example, from a piece we published recently:

Most of the post-1900 examples I can name use zero focalization to move between living minds. uses it to move between living minds and dead ones — between mortal characters, the spirits of unborn children, and a collective we-narrator speaking from beyond death. Take the bathroom scene where the unborn spirits watch their mother sew a stillborn baby back to life:

They were born in a tub, in a bathroom with high clay walls and a flimsy zinc door. They slid out of their mother, a soul with a tightly curled body. She didn’t scream, this mother. She rinsed the body, that silent breathless baby, then washed herself. They watched, curious.

Her lips tight, their mother dug out a spool of thread and a needle attached. Their curiosity morphed into horror and they tried to scream. But spirits cannot scream to the living, so, they could do nothing but watch, dread curling, as the mother pricked her finger, then stabbed the dead baby’s stomach. and blood began to flow along the thread, white to red as it flowed into the body.

Then the body’s eyes opened, and it began to cry. The mother cried too, and hugged the body. The body looked at where They floated, close to the yellow bulb, hatred clear in their eyes. And it smiled. Through its tears, it smiled, and curled further into the mother.

The narrator here is moving freely between several consciousnesses at once: the spirits’ interior (curiosity, horror, dread curling), the mother’s actions and her tight lips, the dead baby that becomes alive and looks back at the spirits with hatred. No single character could narrate this. The spirits couldn’t speak to the living, the mother couldn’t see them, the baby was dead and then was something else. The narrator can see all of it because the narrator is operating from above any single consciousness — and from beyond death. That’s what zero focalization actually buys a writer: the moral and metaphysical authority to say things about the storyworld that exceed any character’s capacity to know.

2.

Internal focalization

The narrative is filtered through a particular character’s consciousness. We see what they see, know what they know, and no more.

In Genette's terms, this is the position where:

Narrator = Character: the narrator says only what a given character know.

Where zero focalization gives you the long view from above, internal focalization locks the camera to one mind. Genette divides internal focalization into two subtypes:

Fixed — the lens stays with one character for the whole novel. His canonical examples are Henry James’s The Ambassadors “where everything passes through Strether,” and What Maisie Knew:

where we almost never leave the point of view of the little girl, whose ‘restriction of field’ is particularly dramatic in this story of adults, a story whose significance escapes her.

Variable — the lens moves between characters but stays inside one consciousness at a time. Genette's example is Madame Bovary, “where the focal character is first Charles, then Emma, then again Charles.”

The variable version is doing more contemporary work than people give it credit for. Genette himself notes:

the commitment as to focalization is not necessarily steady over the whole length of a narrative […] Any single formula of focalization does not, therefore, always bear on an entire work, but rather on a definite narrative section, which can be very short.

The lens can move sentence to sentence, scene to scene, even mid-paragraph. Most novels we’d casually call “third-person limited” are actually variable internal focalization.

James Phelan4 describes it thus:

Internal focalization [is the] center of consciousness narration such as we find in the fiction of Henry James, where the narrator perceives and knows only what the central consciousness perceives and knows.

In other words, the narrator’s knowledge is intrinsically bound to the character’s and that binding so to speak is the engine propelling the story forward.

Having said that, Mieke Bal — and Phelan after her — argued Genette’s strict divide doesn’t quite hold. For Genette, narrators speak and characters see and never the twain shall meet. But Phelan shows that narrators can perceive too. “Determining focalization is just a matter of answering the question who perceives?“ — and the answer can be the narrator, the character, or both at once, sometimes inside the same sentence. Phelan calls the simultaneous version dual focalization. His central example is Lolita: Humbert the narrator perceiving Humbert the character’s past perception of Dolores, two focalizations stacked in the same syntax. The slow change in what Humbert the narrator can bear to perceive across the novel is the moral arc. It’s a way to write retrospective first-person where the present-day narrator and the past self are both focalizing at once — useful any time you want a narrator reckoning with who they were.

Palmer (2004) pushes back on the whole concept from a different angle. He argues:

Focalization was envisaged primarily for, and works very well for, one aspect of mental functioning — perception.

Focalization works well when you’re tracking what a character sees and hears. It gets shaky when you’re tracking what they think, feel, remember, or half-know without realizing. Internal focalization gives you the edge of what a character can perceive. It doesn’t give you the rest of their interior — what’s happening underneath, around, and past the senses. That stuff lives in distance, psycho-narration, and free indirect style. We’ll come back to all of those.

For now, here’s internal focalization at work, from chapter one of Gatsby. Nick has just had dinner with the Buchanans and stepped outside for air when he sees a figure on the lawn:

Example from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (pg 32)

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

And another contemporary example is from this piece we’ve published by recently, the entirety of it fixed internal focalization:

3.

External focalization

The externally focalized narrative reports only what’s observable from outside. There’s not really much interiority, or if there is, it comes through dialogue which isn’t quite the same thing. Think Hammett’s hard-boiled detectives, Hemingway when he’s at his most withholding (“Hills Like White Elephants” — we never enter either character’s mind).

The narrator perceives and knows less than the characters. The reader is locked outside their minds and has to read them entirely from the surface — what they say, what they do, how they move, what they pointedly don’t say. Think of a camera on a shelf. The recording is honest, but the interpretation is entirely yours.

In Genette’s terms, this is Narrator < Character — what Pouillon called “vision from without” and what Genette also calls “the ‘objective’ or ‘behaviorist’ narrative”.

Mieke Bal5 argues that what Genette calls “external focalization” isn’t really focalization at all but its absence — a refusal of access rather than a technique of access. The category is contested. But it’s still the best name we have for prose that holds the reader outside so to speak.

Gerald Prince6 defines external focalization as prose

…limited to the conveyance of the characters’ behavior (words and actions but not thoughts and feelings), their appearance, and the setting against which they come to the fore… the narrator tells less than one or several characters know and abstains from direct commentary and interpretation.

The trouble is that virtually nobody pulls it off purely (inasmuch as such a thing can even happen…more on that later). Alan Palmer points out that “’pure’ behaviorist narrative is difficult if not impossible to find” — and theorists don’t even agree that Hills Like White Elephants qualifies as fully behaviorist. Norman Friedman7 divided the territory into two: the dramatic mode (selective external — what Hemingway actually does) and the camera (pure recording, no selection). The camera mode was always a theoretical limit case because, well, even a camera has to be pointed…someone, a human with independent thought and will, always chooses the angle.

Genette gives a beautiful example of why writers reach for this position in the first place — what he calls “the reason of propriety, or the roguish play with impropriety.” The carriage scene in Madame Bovary: Emma and Léon inside a moving cab, the cab going nowhere in particular for hours, the windows pulled down and Flaubert refusing to let us in. We get only the cab seen from outside — its erratic route through Rouen, the driver’s confusion, a glimpse of a bare hand tossing scraps of paper out the window. The whole adulterous encounter is external focalization as moral discretion. Or external focalization as wink. Either reading works. The refusal of access becomes the thing that makes meaning.

Seymour Chatman8 got so impatient with the whole focalization framework that he wanted to throw the term out and replace it with two new ones: filter (a character’s perceptions) and slant (a narrator’s angle of reporting). Monika Fludernik9 even argued the whole concept should be “scrap[ped]… in its traditional configurations.” External focalization is the position that has provoked the most theoretical pushback in the entire taxonomy — partly because it’s the rarest in practice, partly because every example anyone reaches for ends up debated.

If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing against each other through the same syntax.

Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10, for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is, narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach from a human body.

I partially bring this up because I’m very interested in non-human interiority. I know that can seem like we’re into the whimsical over here but I actually am not whimsy-oriented as much I am interested in this kind of interiority as a real ontological proposition — the dog who is a perceiver, the river that sees and so on and so forth. Focalization is the technical instrument that makes that work (or doesn’t). If you write a story focalized through a horse and the horse just feels like a person in a horse costume, it is a failure of the craft as well as imagination. The focalizer’s vocabulary, sensorium, attention, sense of time and ontological stakes have to actually be, well, the horse’s.

Here, I’m reminded of how, during a recent conversation, Kelly Link recalled a mentor mentioning that every story ought be blessed by an animal. I think fiction and truly literature at large affords limitless opportunities for us to explore the consciousnesses of beings other than those embodied as humans and focalization is a good place to start when trying to learn these techniques in practice. Speaking of which, here are some writing exercises devoting to helping you with exactly that:

Alright, that’s a wrap on Lesson #1 for our second unit in Lit Theory 101.

We’ll bring you Lesson #2 (Distance — Showing vs. Telling) in a few weeks, Here, among other things, we’ll get into why “show, don’t tell” is one of the most damaging pieces of advice the workshop tradition ever produced, and what the actual inquiry is underneath it and more.

Once more, here’s the writing exercises to help you learn more about the Narrator & Focalizer in practice.

Until then, read closely, write slowly, & daydream aplenty.

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With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan

Below the paywall are three detailed writing exercises to deepen your understanding of our second installment of Lit Theory 101 as well as practically apply the lesson on Narrator & Focalizer. We also include, with each exercise, questions to guide and sustain your practice.

Here’s the lesson itself:

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

As you might know, Karan and I are both writers, and we love being writers, and now we’ve also been editors for quite a while. First and foremost though, we feel ourselves to be readers. Without a desire to read (and understand what you read), the first two things — writing and editing — are virtually impossible. We’d very likely be terrible writers and editors if we were terrible readers.

We don’t really do date nights, the two of us, but as a family (along with our daughter) we do lots of story nights. And because we edit two magazines together, we also read and talk about so much exciting, weird, beautiful contemporary fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Beyond that, we do the same for what we read for leisure and pleasure (which, yes, of course we make time for). It’s one of our favorite things — to argue about what works in a story or a poem and why, to vibe with the stuff we both love, to try to trace out some kind of critical analysis that might inform our own work.

With all of this in mind, we thought… wouldn’t it be cool to have some kind of a reading club? There are many cool writing clubs around, and spaces, and workshops, and programs. We run some of those too. But we haven’t really done something strictly focused on the wonders and joys and literary sweetness that springs forth from a really good, close read.

If you’ve done an MFA or are in the process of one, you might be familiar with the Close Read. Reading a piece of writing beforehand, making notes, then coming into class to discuss the work, the whole session generally led by, if you’re lucky, an experienced instructor who can offer the proverbial magical magnifying glass that’ll get to the heart of the work and help it open up for you like never before.

I’ve seldom had such an experience in an academic setting. But at home, during our story evenings, it happens all the time. And that’s kind of what we want to try and offer you. Though we’d love to run these sessions in person, for now we’re going to experiment with an online format, to allow for maximum accessibility.

Here’s what we’re thinking

Our first Strange Pilgrims Club meet will happen on Thursday, April 23rd at 7pm EST, over Zoom.

Since this is a test run, we’ll keep the group small. We’ll save 5 slots for paid subscribers, first-come first-serve, and the remaining 5-10 seats will be open to everyone, also first-come first-serve. After that, there’ll be a waitlist. To enroll, sign up here:

Sign up for Strange Pilgrims Club

The story we’ve picked for this inaugural session is Kelly Link’s “Prince Hat Underground.” The reason is, one: I fucking love this story. Two: it represents very clearly what kind of work we love to publish. And three: there’s a lot in it we can dig into and try to understand in ways that might inform our own writing and creative decisions.

Before the session:

• I’ll send the PDF to everyone who signs up

• Based on the first-come-first-serve basis, I’ll send a Zoom link to those who’ll be attending live

• Read the story once, sit with it, annotate if you wish. Everyone will be given the opportunity to share, but if you’re more of a lurker (high-five) that’s totally fine too.

During the actual session:

• We’ll do quick introductions

• I’ll share a brief presentation to assist our close read

• We’ll read out loud specific sections of the story and dig into them together

• Among other things, we’ll discuss what Link is doing with the fairy-tale bones, where the strangeness is coming from, the nature of whimsy vs. the surreal vs. logic in her tale, how larger themes like love and grief are explored without cliché

• Open yet structured conversation

I want this to feel like the best kind of workshop classroom. The part I’m most looking forward to is where it opens up into everyone talking about the story, and about what literature is doing right now.

The session will run for about 60-90 minutes. If the conversation is thriving I won’t end it prematurely, and anyone who needs to drop off at the 60-minute mark is free to do so (ought to go without saying that I won’t hold you captive before this either, but I want to nurture a sustained space for conversation and analysis, so I’d encourage you to stay for the full 60-90 minutes at least).

The session will be recorded. Paid subscribers will get the recording afterward, so if you can’t make it live, you’ll still have a way in.

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Alrighty, well…we really aren’t sure if there will be any interest at all, so there might be just 3 of us hanging out together. But something tells me there are more of you out there who appreciate the Close Read and want to invigorate your own reading and writing practice.

Without much further ado then, you’re invited to join in on the first ever Strange Pilgrims Club!

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We wish Gabo a very happy 99th birthday and welcome all of you to send us your stories, essays, and flash pieces starting right now! Though the official reading period closes at midnight tonight (est), we will have a grace period of several hours for those in a different timezone. Still, if you’ve got a piece even somewhat ready, we encourage you to send it in sooner than later because this is a lightning-fast open call.

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If you’re looking for some inspiration + submission tips, check out:

As you know, we’ve vowed to keep general submissions free for everyone and we always pay our published writers. One of the ways we can ensure we’ll stick around as an indie, ad-free lit mag are paid subscriptions. If you’ve got the means to do so, please consider upgrading. Among other things, subscribers can access year-round free submissions!

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With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan

Submission Portal

We’ve now read over 7000 submissions to Strange Pilgrims (and sent out 95% of responses from our first reading period). Stories and essays from six continents (still waiting on you, Antarctica). Flash pieces written, we suspect, in single sittings at 2 AM, and novel chapters trimmed to fit our word count like a foot squeezed into a glass slipper (yes, we notice, and no, we don’t hold it against you). Some arrived with cover letters longer than the pieces (not kidding…). Some arrived with no cover letter at all (totally cool). Some made us forget we were reading from so-called slush-pile on a screen way too late into the night.

What follows is something I’ve been meaning to write for a while. After reading this many submissions, there are certain things we wish we could tell every writer before they hit send. So here they are!

Alongside other perks, paid subscribers can also access exclusive writing exercises here (a lot more to come!):

Below we have:

• 9 detailed submission tips covering:

  • First paragraphs

  • How to land your ending

  • Dialogue & rhythm

  • What kind of work to send us and others

  • Why you should submit in the first place

  • Cover letters

  • & more!!

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One of the best books we read last year was THE FRAGRANCE OF GUAVA, a conversation between friends: journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Nobel-Award-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The book’s surprisingly not so widely read or even known from what I’ve gathered, but I’m so grateful to the bookworm gods for allowing me to chance upon this beauty in a used bookshop.

Now, before I dive into our 7 timeless Márquezian lessons, I’ll recommend to each and every one of you to please buy yourself a copy yesterday.

Paired with these, we have 7 Writing Exercises “Stolen” from the Master himself, complete with detail, examples, and direct quotes from Marquez. Though the lessons below are all free to read, the exercises are accessible to our paying subscribers only. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support our work and efforts here at Strange Piglrims towards indie lit.

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1. Imagination and fantasy are opposites

This is probably one of the most important thing Márquez ever said about making things, and almost nobody quotes it.

“Fantasy, in the sense of pure and simple Walt-Disney-style invention without any basis in reality, is the most loathsome thing of all.”

Every so-called supernatural event in his fiction traces back to something that actually happened. The yellow butterflies that follow Mauricio Babilonia in One Hundred Years of Solitude? When Márquez was five, an electrician kept coming to change the meter at his grandparents’ house. His grandmother tried to shoo away a butterfly with a duster, saying, “Whenever this man comes to the house, that yellow butterfly follows him.” This was the seed for Babilonia.

Remedios the Beauty ascending to heaven? A woman in town whose granddaughter had run away in the early hours of the morning “tried to hide the fact by putting the word around that she had gone up to heaven.” Here, Márquez describes how he wrote the actual passage:

Yes, she just wasn’t getting off the ground. I was frantic because there was no way of making her take off. One day as I was thinking about this problem I went out into my garden. It was very windy. A very big, very beautiful black woman had just done the washing and was trying to hang the sheets out on the line. She couldn’t, the wind kept blowing them away. I had a brainwave. ‘That’s it ,’ I thought. Remedios the Beautiful needed sheets to ascend to heaven . In this case, the sheets were the element of reality. When I returned to my typewriter, Remedios the Beautiful went up and up with no trouble at all. Not even God could have stopped her.

The distinction matters more now than it ever has. We live in an age of pure invention — AI-generated images, endless fantasy world-building, content conjured from nothing. Márquez would have found all of it loathsome (yes, we’ll bet on it). Not because it’s technology, but because it’s disconnected from the lived world. The difference between imagination and fantasy “is the same as between a human being and a ventriloquist’s dummy.” (Sorry to break it all us hardcore fantasy lovers haha).

2. You only write one book your whole life.

Márquez believed every writer spends an entire career circling one obsession. Balzac did it. Kafka did it. Faulkner did it. His was solitude.

The Colonel waiting Friday after Friday for a pension that never comes. Aureliano Buendía waging 32 wars and ending up alone making little gold fishes. The Patriarch so isolated by power he’s no longer sure of his own name.

When Mendoza asks where this obsession came from, Márquez says, “I think it’s a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it.”

Then he offers the key to the entire Buendía family, maybe the most revealing single sentence he ever said about his most famous book: “The Buendías were incapable of loving and this is the key to their solitude and their frustration. Solitude, I believe, is the opposite of solidarity.”

3. A good idea can wait decades. If it can’t, it wasn’t good.

Márquez held One Hundred Years of Solitude in his head (and heart) for 15 before writing it. The Autumn of the Patriarch took 17. Chronicle of a Death Foretold took 30.

30 years.

When asked if this worried him, he said: “I’ve never really been interested in any idea which can’t withstand many years of neglect.”

He never took notes. “When you take notes you end up thinking about the notes and not about the book.” He waited for the missing piece — the tone, the structure, the one detail that made the whole thing fall blissfully into place. For One Hundred Years, it was the realization that he had to tell the story the way his grandmother told hers: deadpan, mixing the extraordinary with the ordinary, never flinching. For The Autumn of the Patriarch, the missing piece came from a book about hunting in Africa. He’d been struggling with the dictator’s psychology for years. Then he read a chapter on elephant behavior, and it unlocked everything.

In an era of content calendars and bi-weekly newsletters and AI drafts generated in seconds, Márquez is a standing rebuke. The most important phase of creation looks like nothing is happening. We’re systematically destroying our capacity for it.

4. The first sentence is a laboratory.

“The first sentence can be the laboratory for testing the style, the structure and even the length of the book.”

He said it sometimes took him longer to write the first sentence than the rest of the book combined. The famous opener of One Hundred Years of Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”) contains the entire novel’s method in miniature: the telescoping of time, the melding of violence and wonder, the central character, and of course the charming storytelling voice.

5. Your grandmother is a better teacher than your MFA

When Mendoza asked who had been the greatest help in his long apprenticeship as a writer, Márquez didn’t name Faulkner or Kafka or Hemingway. He said: “My grandmother, first and foremost.”

Doña Tranquilina told stories about the dead walking through the house as if she were describing what she’d had for lunch. So it’s natural that “[Marquez] wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude using [his] grandmother’s method.”

This is worth sitting with. The most celebrated novelist of the twentieth century learned his method not from literature but from an elderly woman in a hot, crumbling house in a Colombian banana town who talked to ghosts. The technique that made him world-famous — treating the impossible as mundane — came from watching her do it every day.

He did credit Kafka with helping him realize he could be a writer: “When I read Metamorphosis, at 17, I realized I could be a writer. When I saw how Gregor Samsa could wake up one morning transformed into a gigantic beetle, I said to myself, ‘I didn’t know you could do this.’” The connection went deeper. Kafka, he said, “recounted things in German the same way my grandmother used to.”

6. Reality is wilder than anything you can invent.

“There’s not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality.”

He made a larger point about Latin America that applies well beyond it: “Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things.” An American explorer saw a river with boiling water in the Amazon. Winds from the South Pole swept an entire circus away in Argentina, and fishermen caught the bodies of lions and giraffes in their nets. A boy turned up in Barranquilla claiming to have a pig’s tail, after Márquez had written about one.

“I know very ordinary people who’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude carefully and with a lot of pleasure, but with no surprise at all because, when all is said and done, I’m telling them nothing that hasn’t happened in their own lives.”

The lesson: if your work feels thin, you don’t need more imagination. You need to pay closer attention to what’s already there.

7. Protect the conditions for working. Everything else is negotiable.

Márquez was specific about what he needed: a quiet, well-heated room. 9am to 3pm . An electric typewriter and 500 sheets of paper. Yellow roses on the desk. He wore mechanic’s coveralls while writing. If the rose was missing from the vase, the words wouldn’t arrive. When he put it back, everything flowed.

He was also ruthless about what he didn’t need. He loathed television, congresses, conferences, round tables, and interviews. He stopped writing letters entirely after discovering someone had sold his correspondence to a university archive.

“I don’t hold with the romantic myth that the writer has to be starving and all screwed up before he can produce. You write better if you’ve had a good meal and you’ve got an electric typewriter.”

Mercedes, his wife, understood this completely. When he turned the car around on the highway to Acapulco because the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude had suddenly come to him, she took charge. He pawned their car. She got the butcher to extend credit for meat, the baker for bread, the landlord to wait nine months for rent. She brought him 500 sheets of paper whenever he ran out. She never read the manuscript. When it was done, she mailed it to the publisher herself, thinking: “And what if the novel turns out to be no good after all this?”

Serious creative work requires a kind of almost maniacal logistical protection, and someone — yes, most likely you, if you don’t have as supportive a spouse as Mercedes — has to build the scaffolding around the precious hours.

We hope these lessons were as invigorating to read for you as they were to create for us. Once again, we’d recommend you read the entirety of FRAGRANCE OF GUAVA. You can also access our practical companion of all 7 related writing exercises here:

With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan

Note on Art

The portrait1 used above captures something Márquez said about himself: that he was more superstitious than rational, more Caribbean than literary. The yellow skin echoes his famous obsession with the color — yellow roses on his desk, yellow butterflies in his fiction — while the closed eyes suggest the inward gaze of a man who trusted his grandmother’s ghost stories more than any writing workshop.

Everything below comes directly from how Gabriel García Márquez actually worked. Each exercise takes a principle from the book and turns it into something you can do this week to practically improve your writing or enter deeper into work you’re already wrestling with.

Read more

As we head into the holidays, we wanted to share a reading list with you. Maybe you’ll want to add some of these books to that ever-elusive TBR. Maybe you’ll acquire some physical copies from your local bookshops. Or maybe you’ll just look at these and know: here is literature I can find refuge in.

None of these are classified by (sub)genres, because, we believe that as writers and readers we ought to rage against all sorts of borders. And there’s no hierarchy nor publication years noted. Read elliptically, randomly, spiral if you must. Welcome the maze of literature into your life and get lost in it. Reading is resistance.

1. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

2. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

3. The Vegetarian by Han Kang

4. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

5. Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin

6. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

7. “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville

8. Severance by Ling Ma

9. The Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. Le Guin

10. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

11. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

12. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

13. Paper Crown by Heather Christle

14. The Invention of the Darling by Li-Young Lee

15. Luminous by Silvia Park

16. Ice by Jacek Dukaj

17. The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

18. Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

19. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

20. Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

21. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

22. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris

23. The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

24. Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott

25. Dan Joanna Ruocco

26. Wild Milk Sabrina Orah Mark

27. Water Look Away Bob Hicok

28. Impossible Creatures Katherine Rundell

29. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

30. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

31. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

P.S.: If you know any of these books and want to share your experiences with them (good or otherwise), please do so below. Additionally, if there are books you’d like us and others to read over the winter and beyond, do mention them in the comments, please!

Leave a comment

Literary theory has a reputation problem. Most of us might have encountered it in some airless seminar where a professor droned on about the death of the author while we wondered if we were dead too. Or it was rammed down our throats as the jargon that gets between us and the actual pleasure of reading—like someone explaining a joke until it stops being funny.

Fuck that version of theory.

Theory done right is electric. It’s the moment you realize why a story you love works. We’ve created this crash course for folks who devour literature and want to write better. We’ll cover concepts that have beguiled us in our own quest to be better readers and writers and editors. And because lit theory is the behemoth you didn’t know you needed to experience, we’ll divide this up into (hopefully!!) manageable parts consisting of six different units:

1. Narrative Structure & Time

2. Voice, Consciousness & Distance

3. Language & Perception

4. Reader, Text & Interpretation

5. Affect, Atmosphere, & the Ineffable

6. Character & Characterization

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   Strange Pilgrims is an indie, ad-free, & reader-support lit mag. Thank you for your support!

All six of these units will be completely free to read when first sent out. We believe learning ought to be accessible and practical insofar as it can be. This is our little effort in trying to do so.

Alongside them, each unit will come with a couple writing exercises we’ve designed to get you working with the techniques and concepts learned in the lessons. Our intention for these additional materials is to help you make tangible something that is innately intellectual. There will also be an opportunity to share your own writing in the comments and receive feedback from peers.

Today, we’lI focus on Narrative Structure & Time: how stories arrange events, break chronology, refuse linearity, and let structure emerge from content instead of imposing it from outside.

Here are the writing exercises that pair with the lessons below:

Read more

Hello friends,

Below are four writing exercises that pair with:

We hope they’ll feel like invitations to deepen your own writing and reading practice. If you feel motivated or a little brave, we’d love it if you shared what you’ve come up with in the comments. We hope to make this space feel like somewhere you can receive both encouragement and feedback (should you want it!).

Once again, this thread is only for paid subscribers, but our entire Lit Theory 101 crash course will be free for all to read. If we’ve added something positive to your lives in anyway, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Read more

Dear friends,

Let’s face it—who amongst us doesn’t like to judge? We’re human, after all. Gossip is one of the oldest (and dare I say, one of the funnest) forms of storytelling. Critique, then, might be called a higher form of gossip. And the best kind of critique also makes for excellent storytelling.

As you know, we’re currently open for short stories, creative nonfiction, and flash and many of you have sent in your beautiful work to us already. However, we’ve also been fielding questions from many of you on whether we include reviews as part of our flash or nonfiction categories.

Moreover, as we wander around Substack, we’re witnessing a very alive and growing culture of reviewers and academics and snappy, zesty, hilarious critics that are both intellectual and enjoyable to read. We want to feed and (not gonna lie) also define that space.

So, we’ve decided to open up for a separate reviews call…with our own strange twist!

If you’ve already submitted a story or an essay to us, you can still send a review! We’ll pay $50 per published review. Each review must be ~1500 words (we’re not the word-count police so don’t overthink it)—just give us something entertaining and enlightening. The topics we’re interested in include (but are in no way limited to):

• Books

• Movies

• Television

• Visual Art

• Theatre

• Music

• Other Substacks/Blogs/Newsletters

• A ghost town on Google Maps

• The many different kinds of silence

• Airports, bus stations, motel lobbies

• Made-up worlds

• Your hometown

• A politician

• The contents of a stranger’s shopping cart

• Shoes

• Your 21,347 screenshots

• Your favourite snacks

• Anything Internet

• The religion you abandoned

• The religion you reclaimed

• God

• A year in your life, any year

• Tarot decks

• Aesthetic trends

• A person

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Send us your review here →

All submissions are—and always will be—free. To run a magazine that doesn’t charge fees and pays writers, we rely on our readers. If you’d like to help sustain Strange Pilgrims, you can:

1. Become a paid subscriber

2. Leave a tip when submitting

3. Request paid editorial feedback (via the submission form)

   ---

Subscribe now

We are now at 140 paid subscribers! Our hearts are full and we are so damn grateful. Thank you so much for believing in us. On January 8, our first selected piece will go out and we can’t wait for you all the read it.

For those of you still considering a paid subscription, this is what your support will help us with:

• At 250 paid subscribers, we can cover operating costs — paying writers, commissioning art, design, and keeping the lights on (in our heads and on the site).

• At 500, we can release beautiful quarterly digital issues.

• At 1000, we can dream of going to print!

Share Strange Pilgrims

If you have more questions, please look through our FAQ to see if we might have already addressed it. Otherwise, shoot us an email.

Alright, friends. Let’s get critical!

Shannan & Karan

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working on this handpicked & annotated compendium of things worth your time—short fiction to shake your soul, cinema that feels like a friendly ghost from a better universe, essays that crack open like a matryoshka doll, music for becoming and unbecoming, and so much more.

We hope for Strange Pilgrims to be a place of gentle repose on the hammock of conscious experience—digital and otherwise.

This entire post is completely free, and will always remain so. If it speaks to you, we’ll make it a series. We want these gems to reach anyone who needs them.

And if our mission resonates with you—if you believe in what we stand (and hope) for—please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Doing so directly supports our efforts to slowly but surely build a truly indie, free, and accessible literary space for readers and writers alike.

Subscribe now

Also, if there’s anything here that moves you, we hope you’ll restack it and share why. We’d love to overwhelm the algorithm with art & literature that is beyond a quick glance. Please also share in the comments what you love from this list, what you’d like to recommend—art and media that rules your imagination.

Okay, here we go!

⟡ Stories ⟡

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid | A masterclass in compression…the rhythm alone will stay with you for days.

Stone Animals by Kelly Link | Southern gothic doused in magic realism set aflame with the match of the ghost story.

The Nose by Nikolai Gogol | Peak absurdist horror…surreal, satirical, and somehow still unsettling nearly 200 years later.

Mrs. Mabb by Susanna Clarke | Fairy logic enwrapping a Victorian household with devastating consequences.

My Sad Dead by Mariana Enríquez | Argentine gothic that fuses ghost story with social commentary.

The Country Doctor by Franz Kafka | Impossible distances, nightmare logic, a perfect Kafka fever dream.

The Black Sheep by Italo Calvino | Flash Fiction as fable, distilling an entire moral universe into a few deceptively simple paragraphs.

The Wife’s Story by Ursula K. Le Guin | A perspective flip that reframes everything you think you know about transformation stories (also werewolves).

The Depressed Person by David Foster Wallace | A scary-good must-read work of fiction for a writer in any genre wanting to learn how to balance the experimental with the emotional.

Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim | One of the best new short stories we’ve ever read, period.

⟡ Collections ⟡

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez | Twelve stories that stretch and compress with the gum and glue of magic and melancholy, but never forget to entertain.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke | Joyful, enrapturing, and playing with themes of delightful danger, all rooted in folkloric and historical storytelling.

Honeycomb by Joanne Harris | Super short dark, original fairy tales that’ll make you feel simultaneously like a child wanting mama and a 100-year old wizard.

The Complete Stories by Leonora Carrington | Surrealist short fiction coloring the page with wild and warping language just as she painted her canvases.

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu | Fifteen fantastical and bittersweet stories drawn from Chinese myth, legend, and the Asian-American experience.

Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser | Sixteen stories, hyperrealistically married to weirdness, about disquiet at the heart of being human capturing strange and uncanny suburbia

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro | Five linked stories set at night, always with music somewhere in the framing.

⟡ Essays ⟡

Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle | This essay opened our literary world up beyond what we can describe and undoubtedly it has done the same for many others, too. Short enough to read in five minutes, will stay with you forever.

The I in the Internet by Jia Tolentino | Capturing the internet’s descent from apparent utopia where everything was possible to an engine of self-delusion.

Stranger in the Village by James Baldwin | Baldwin uses a remote Swiss village where no Black person had ever been seen to illuminate how American identity—both Black and white—was forged through mutual estrangement, rage, and an irreversible entanglement that Europeans will never understand.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus | Is life worth living in the face of the absurd?

Street Haunting: A London Adventure by Virginia Woolf | Buying a pencil becomes an excuse to wander London streets at dusk in this meditation on self, observation, and the pleasure of eschewing identity.

On Fairy Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien | The seminal essay that changed how we understand fantasy, first delivered as a lecture at St. Andrews in 1938.

⟡ Essay Collections ⟡

Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov | A collection of interviews, letters, and essays where Nabokov holds nothing back.

A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain | Part memoir, part meditation, all of it entirely its own thing. Published by Dorothy Project, beloved by writers who resist easy categories.

Mythologies by Roland Barthes | Essential for understanding how the everyday is always ideological, how nothing is just itself. After reading this, you’ll never look at an advertisement the same way.

⟡ Movies ⟡

8 ½ (1963) dir. Federico Fellini | The ultimate film about creative paralysis disguised as creative abundance.

His House (2020) dir. Remi Weekes | A refugee horror film that understands haunting as literal and political.

Spirited Away (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki | Miyazaki’s Alice in Wonderland by way of Japanese folklore and environmental anxiety.

Sister Midnight (2024) dir. Karan Kandhari | Fantastic, entertaining portrayal of female rage in an absurdist, hilarious domestic horror.

Incendies (2010) dir. Denis Villeneuve | Stunned me to the core but do NOT read anything about it. Just fucking watch it, please.

Oddity (2024) dir. Damian McCarthy | I can’t explain it but it’s slow-burn and fast-paced at the same damn time. Grief horror done RIGHT (aka not boring and actually effective).

The Cup (1999) dir. Khyentse Norbu | If this film doesn’t make you smile and want to love soccer (if you already don’t), then I don’t know what will.

Orlando (1992) dir. Sally Potter | Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid time-traveling nobleman, finally given the film adaptation it deserved.

Pyaasa (1957) dir. Guru Dutt | One of the best (and, sorry but also few) amazingly literary, beautiful Hindi cinema films.

⟡ Television ⟡

Midnight Mass (2021) created by Mike Flanagan | Religious horror on the outset but internally a meditation on faith, death, community, and addiction.

Scavenger’s Reign (2023) created by Joe Bennett & Charles Huettner | Unbelievably inventive piece of speculative storytelling that pretty much no one seems to have heard of…just lock in and experience it!

Dark (2017-2020) created by Baran bo Odar & Jantje Friese | German puzzlebox of a series that’s short and brutally beautiful and seemingly confusing but also deeply inviting and, most important of all–it sticks the fucking landing.

Maniac (2018) created by Patrick Somerville | Fever-dream pharmaceutical romance fueled by two drool-worthy performances.

Undone (2019-2022) created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg & Kate Purdy | Rotoscoped animation about trauma, time, and whether you’re having a mental health crisis or experiencing an altered state of true transcendence.

Over the Garden Wall (2014) created by Patrick McHale | Ten episodes, eleven minutes each, a perfect, animated fairy tale epic.

My Lady Jane (2024) created by Gemma Burgess | Revisionist historical fantasy that asks: what if Lady Jane Grey’s nine-day reign went differently. Also, delightfully horny.

Evil (2019-2024) created by Robert King & Michelle King | Absolutely the best show you (probably) haven’t seen about a skeptic psychologist, a Black Catholic priest, and a non-practicing Muslim defeating EVIL in modern America.

Ted Lasso (2020-2023) created by Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt & Joe Kelly | We debated including this one on here because we thought everyone must have heard of this but K says none of the kids in the undergrad composition class he’s teaching have, so…kids in composition classes and everyone else – this is a beautifully joyful show about trauma, forgiveness, and oh yeah a bit of “football”. Sincerity at its finest.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2015) created by Toby Haynes | A perfect BBC adaptation of a perfect Susanna Clarke novel. Glorious, charming, magical, delicious.

⟡ Albums ⟡

Various Positions (1984) Leonard Cohen | Columbia Records refused to release this album in the US because they thought it would lose them money. This is also the album with one of the most recognizable and covered songs in the word: Hallelujah. And our personal favorite, much lesser known: The Night Comes On.

Arvo Pärt: Alina (1999) Arvo Pärt | Silence and sound dance the waltz and fall in love and it’s mesmerizing.

The Best of Nina Simone (1969) Nina Simone | The best doorway to her music all she stands for.

Night Song (2019) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan | Even if you don’t understand the lyrics, this will make you feel like you’re on a date with God.

One Go Around (2017) Jeffrey Martin | The Raymond Carver of indie folk and also the first person whose concert we watched live (in Toronto)!

Bearer of Bad News (2015) Andy Shauf | He plays almost every instrument himself, building these detailed sonic worlds for sad people. This concept album launched him into indie stardom.

The Empty Northern Hemisphere (2009) Gregory Alan Isakov | Lyrics that are nothing short of poetry and rooted in the realness of life while evoking a softer, sweeter existence (even if steeped in melodious melancholy).

At Swim (2016) Lisa Hannigan | I (Shannan) first started listening to Lisa when I was 14 and I remember wanting her to be my big sister. Her music is warm hug and a box of chocolates as well as the weeping willow and the long, lonely day…the beauty in the dissolution

Eternelle (1987) Edith Piaf | The world is transformed by love and immortalized by Piaf in this endlessly enigmatic album. Each song is iconic. And though many have tried, no one sings like her.

⟡ Literary Magazines ⟡

ONLY POEMS | Many of you have asked us if we accept poetry and while no, Strange Pilgrims doesn’t (or, rather, won’t) be publishing poetry, we do have a poetry magazine that we named after Only Fans but actually truly after Leonard Cohen’s The Only Poem.

Emergence | Award-winning, gorgeously designed digital and print magazine publishing essays, interviews, poems, fiction, photography, and art. They’ve also got a podcast now and you can engage with their work seamlessly on their website. It’s a whole experience and unlike anything we’ve seen in the lit mag space.

Splinter Journal | Clean, magical, intentionally crafted lit mag based in Australia. They’re super new and have just released their second issue. We’re rooting for them to redefine lit mag design!

Waxwing | A prestigious indie lit mag featuring work that’s been placed in many end-of-year awards anthologies. We love how the whole archive is free to access and read in a clean, simple interface.

Little Engines | A part-punk, part highbrow art-critic, part-rockstar, part-teen-with-a-dream vibes Substack-based lit mag featuring poetry, essays, columns, reviews, and lots more. They pay and are open to submissions right now!

Clarkesworld | Pretty much the zenith of sci-fi lit mags. Everything’s free to read and we can guarantee you’ll find something to enjoy in every single issue (released monthly).

ONLY POEMS DAILY | A poem a day keeps the devil away.

ONLY POEMS DAILY

Wake up to a poem every day & slip into a slower, sweeter life.

Sub Club | Submission opportunities galore. I (Shannan) write and edit this Substack along with some other amazing people. We have something for writers at every stage.

Sub Club

Submission opportunities for creative and professional writers delivered to your inbox weekly.

Dear Head of Mine | Honestly, I don’t know why Sean’s newsletter doesn’t already have thousands of subscribers. He writes in such a human way about all things connected to editing and the publishing industry. And almost all of it’s free!

Dear Head of Mine

An editor's weekly newsletter about books and other things

By Sean deLone

The Intrinsic Perspective | One of our favorite Substacks encompassing everything from literature to culture to history to art to the digital world to our potential demise but also our great upliftment to…you get my point. Half of the posts here are also free so you can read a good chunk before making a paid dive.

The Intrinsic Perspective

Natural philosophy, belles-lettres, polemics.

By Erik Hoel

⟡ Podcasts ⟡

Literature & History (2016-present) hosted by Doug Metzger | Long, organized episodes replete with philosophical, historical, and cultural analyses of seminal literary works.

Imaginary Worlds (2015-present) hosted by Eric Molinsky | An award-winning speculative literary podcast featuring conversations with novelists, screenwriters, artists, and more on crafting, well, imaginary worlds.

The History of Literature (2015-present) hosted by Jacke Wilson | Started in 2015 with the intention to answer the question “is literature dying?” this podcast very wonderfully proves that no–literature has and always will be, well and alive and, sometimes, downright iconic.

Backlisted (2016-present) hosted by John Mitchinson & Andy Miller | Diving into forgotten or overlooked books, the hosts and guests have a lot of fun as they joyously leap into tangents about publishing history and personal reading obsessions. Needless to say, every episode makes you want to order the book in question immediately.

Books of Some Substance (2014-present) hosted by David Southard, Nick Scandy, & Nathan Sharp | Notable episodes have covered books like The Brothers Karamazov, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Gravity’s Rainbow but even the books you might not have heard about are worth learning about through these wonderful hosts who never really flounder around much (can be pretty rare in podcasters, hah!)

If we could, we’d include every single Leonard Cohen interview here. But in the interest of some semblance of objectivity, we’ll start with just one. As ever, you’ll find a disarmingly honest man at once touching the shore of material life while immersed in a degree of mysterious transcendence.

Oh the times of yore when real conversations took place in smoke-filled rooms with people who, despite intellectual friction, rejoiced in the rigor of the adventure it is to reach at truth—emotional and otherwise!

A 4-hour documentary tracing how Freudian ideas about the unconscious were weaponized by corporations and politicians to turn citizens into consumers, transforming democracy from rational engagement into the management of irrational desires.

Excavating temporal illusions—why childhood lasted forever but decades now disappear, why certain events feel impossibly recent or ancient, and the strange mechanisms our brains use to place things in time when we can’t actually grasp its scale.

Marlon Brando was a divisive and, to some, difficult figure to comprehend. He was one of the original famous antidisestablishmentarianist artists.

As problematic as Charlie Rosen is, this interview is absolutely worth experiencing because Toni Morrison’s charisma and intellect and heart are on full display here.

A brilliant, weaving, dare I say sweating, interview where Wallace essentially predicts the conundrum we’re in today.

Arendt talks about maintaining plural human capacities—thinking and acting, beginning and enduring—not as ideals but as practiced realities in a world that wants to flatten us into work-consume cycles.

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May you make beautiful art,

Some days we feel like postal clerks in a dream…sorting envelopes in a long, humming corridor that extends out into infinity. Perhaps that’s our inner Romantic, but in a world all washed in lightlessness, it can feel wonderful to see the joy in small things. Which is to say, we answered 237 emails and are making our way through the hundreds of Substack DM requests and it’s heartening to see the excitement you all have for Strange Pilgrims.

We love hearing from you! And since many of your questions are echoes of each other, we thought we’d answer the most frequently asked questions here.

What follows is perhaps less a logistical info-dump and more a map to how we work (or, in some cases, the ideals we aspire to). Our answers cover things like: where to send your stories, what we’re hoping to read, stuff about money, our AI policy, what we can and can’t do as editors and as a magazine, and more…

Subscribe now

Please do read these before sending any questions through. If you still can’t find what you need—we’re always here. But we hope this helps light the way.

⟡ How can I submit my work? ⟡

Please use our custom submission portal. We don’t read submissions sent via email or DMs—it’s the only way we can stay organized (and sane).

⟡ How many pieces can I send at a time? ⟡

One piece at a time, please. Any multiple submissions will be rejected unread, so send your best piece, whether it’s a short story, essay, or flash.

⟡ Can I send work for more than one category (multiple submissions)? ⟡

No. Please pick one category—short story, essay, flash fiction, or flash nonfiction—and wait to hear back before submitting another. We know it can be hard to choose, but trust you gut and send your best.

⟡ Do you accept previously published work? ⟡

No, we do not currently accept work previously published by another journal, anthology, or book. We do, however, consider self-published work (work that’s appeared on your blog, personal Substack, social media, etc.)

⟡ Can I send the same piece to other magazines (simultaneous submissions)? ⟡

Yes, absolutely. Just let us know right away via email if it’s accepted elsewhere.

⟡ My story/essay got accepted elsewhere. How do I withdraw a piece? ⟡

Congratulations! Please send us an email with “Withdraw” as the Subject Line to let us know.

⟡ I left a typo in my submission. Can I send a revised version? ⟡

Please do not email us for typos—they never affect our decision. There is no need to withdraw your submission if there are a few errors. If accepted, you’ll have a chance to send a revised piece before publication.

⟡ What’s the word limit? ⟡

Flash — up to 1,000 words | Stories & essays — up to 5,000 words

⟡ My story is 5,128 words long. Is it eligible? ⟡

Yes. These word limits are more prescriptive than prohibitive. However, longer the piece goes above word count, the more it has to prove itself.

⟡ Can I submit under a pen name? ⟡

Yes, you can.

⟡ Do you require author photos to go with each publication? ⟡

No. If your piece is selected, we’ll publish a short interview alongside it. You’re welcome to include a photo and bio, but neither is required.

⟡ Can I pitch instead of submitting a finished piece? ⟡

No. We only consider completed work.

⟡ Can I submit work in translation? ⟡

Yes, we welcome translated work—it expands the conversation across languages, which is what literature has always done. Please include the original author’s name and confirm you have their permission. If you write in another language, you may also submit your own work translated into English.

⟡ What is flash writing? ⟡

Flash writing is very short prose—usually under 1,000 words—that still carries the weight of a full story or essay. Sometimes called micro-fiction or sudden fiction, it has roots in storytelling traditions across cultures (think fables, parables, vignettes). That said, it doesn’t have to take those forms—we’re open to anything that feels complete, alive, and unforgettable. In flash, every word counts. The best pieces leave you breathless by the end.

⟡ What is flash nonfiction? ⟡

Think of it as the compressed cousin of the essay: under 1,000 words, rooted in fact, yet lyrical, narrative, or experimental in form. A sliver of memory, an obsession, an overheard moment, told with the cadence of a story. Flash CNF (Flash Creative Nonfiction) should feel complete in itself, even if it gestures beyond its borders (as all good writing does). Book, movie, music, and art reviews are welcome under this category.

⟡ What kind of stories and essays are you looking for? ⟡

We’re looking for prose that feels original and intellectually alive. That could mean a surreal story, a slow-burning essay, a journalistic piece, a fragmented flash, a speculative vignette, sci-fi, romance—the list goes on! We care less about genre and more about whether the writing moves us—emotionally, yes, but also narratively. Does the story actually go somewhere?

You can find more detail about our taste (and the authors who shape it) on our About page.

⟡ Can I send serialized work, excerpts from a larger project, or something in episodes? ⟡

Yes, as long as the excerpts you send stand alone. We should be able to read it without needing the rest of the book or series.

⟡ Do you publish poetry? ⟡

No, we do not publish poetry. Strange Pilgrims is devoted to prose in all its forms and moods. We do, however, edit another magazine solely devoted to poetry: ONLY POEMS. Feel free to send your poetry for consideration there.

⟡ Do you consider stories with illustrations or visual elements? ⟡

Yes, if visuals are inseparable from your story/essay, send them along. That said, we collaborate closely with our in-house artist Mariam Chagelishvili, to shape the visual aesthetic of the magazine.

⟡ I submitted my piece today—when will I hear back? ⟡

About four months after you’ve submitted. Sometimes sooner, rarely longer (and if it’s longer, it usually means we’re seriously considering your piece). Please refrain from querying about the status of your submission until this time has elapsed.

We understand the frustration of slow responses. The industry average is closer to six months, and we’re doing our best to stay ahead of that. We also accept simultaneous submission and previously self-published work so that you can keep sharing your writing in the meantime.

⟡ Do you ever cap submissions or close early? ⟡

No. We will never close our calls early, no matter how many submissions we receive. You’ll always have the full submission window to send us your work—whether it’s on day one or a minute before midnight on deadline day, we’ll read it with the same care and attention as every other piece.

We also refuse to cap submissions, because doing so punishes the writers who submit later, often through no fault of their own. Deadlines are hard enough—especially for neurodivergent writers who may need more time. Our goal is simple: to publish amazing writing, not just the work of those who happen to be well-organized.

⟡ Do you provide feedback on declined submissions? ⟡

No, our time is limited, and we’re unable to provide feedback on any submission. If you would like a detailed response, you may choose the optional editorial feedback service when submitting, in which case you’ll receive a comprehensive feedback letter.

⟡ How often do you publish? ⟡

As of now, we plan to publish every Thursday (starting January 8, 2026). We’ll alternate between flash and long-form: one week a flash piece (fiction or nonfiction), the next week a full-length story or essay. If this changes or evolves, we’ll be sure to let you know.

⟡ Who will be reading my writing? ⟡

We, the founders and editors, of Strange Pilgrims, will read each and every piece submitted to us. Here are our professional bios:

Shannan Mann is the Nonfiction Editor of Strange Pilgrims and Creative Director of ONLY POEMS. Honored by the Emily Morrison Short Story Award, Irene Adler Essay Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Auburn Witness prize, among others; her poems appear in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Gulf Coast, Literary Review of Canada, EPOCH & elsewhere; essays in Tolka Journal and Going Down Swinging. She also translates Sanskrit literature. She’s currently working on her novel.

Karan Kapoor is the Fiction Editor of Strange Pilgrims and Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS. Finalist for the Felix Pollak Prize & Charles B. Wheeler Book prize, his recent poems appear in Best New Poets, AGNI, Shenandoah, IMAGE, Colorado Review, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and elsewhere; fiction in JOYLAND and the other side of hope; translations in The Offing and The Los Angeles Review. He’s currently working on working on his novel.

⟡ Do I retain the rights to my work? ⟡

Yes. We ask for first serial rights—meaning we’re the first publication (magazine, press, anthology, book, etc) to feature your piece. We also request archival rights to keep your work up our website (which is our Substack).

Work you’ve self-published on your blog, personal Substack, or social media is fine to send our way and doesn’t interfere with the above. After your piece is published, all rights return to you. As is the industry standard, if your work is later reprinted in a book or anthology, we ask that you acknowledge that it first appeared in Strange Pilgrims.

⟡ How much do you pay contributors? ⟡

$200 for long-form | $50 for flash

⟡ I don’t use PayPal. Is there another way to be paid? ⟡

Unfortunately, we’re only able to pay via PayPal right now. We’re happy to send your honorarium to your friend’s or relative’s account if you don’t have one.

⟡ Why do you interview your writers? ⟡

We have spent hours listening to our favorite artists take part in interviews that feel like you’re sitting right there in the room with them, as the rest of the world melts away and, for a moment, everything feels clearer. A good interview is another piece of literature in its own right.

That’s the feeling we’d like you to have when perusing Strange Pilgrims. An interview helps unlock what even an astute reader might miss, and also carries us past the story itself—into the mind and heart of the one that conjured it. Ultimately, we want to publish writers, not just what they’ve written.

⟡ Why are you on Substack? ⟡

At this point, we’re finding Substack aligns with the vision we have for Strange Pilgrims. Each story we publish will arrive like a letter, straight to your inbox. That kind of intimacy feels rare and worth holding onto.

Substack also gives us the ability to grow a community around the magazine in a way that feels seamless and natural. Readers can respond, share, and take part in conversations. And we value that it’s ad-free (as ad-free as one can be in late-stage capitalism) while offering readers an easy, transparent way to support the publications they believe in.

It also saves us the cost and labor of creating and maintaining a custom website.

⟡ Will you ever go to print? ⟡

Right now, our focus is on building a sustainable literary magazine that has a real, dedicated readership. We want the work to be free and accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world.

That said, we love print as much as anyone—that messy stack of mags and books on the coffee table, the rolled up copy carried on a train, the kind of falling-apart, colorful chaotic thing you stumble across years later in a used bookshop. So, once we cross 1000 paid subscribers, we’ll start seriously considering a print edition for those who crave that tangible, analog ritual.

⟡ Are you hiring? (Illustrators, editors, slush readers?) ⟡

Not at the moment, but if we open up for volunteer roles, we’ll announce them publicly.

⟡ If all your stories and interviews are free to read, why would anyone pay for a subscription? ⟡

Our model is simple: the magazine itself stays forever free, open and accessible to everyone. Paid subscriptions are how we keep it alive: how we pay writers, cover costs, and build something sustainable without ads.

Paid subscribers also receive a few perks:

• Year-round free submissions

• Special posts + resources on writing, editing and publishing

• A subscriber-only chat space for ideas, prompts and advice

• & for Super Supporters: an annual in-depth editorial feedback letter

But honestly…what you’re really supporting is the possibility of a publication like Strange Pilgrims existing at all—open to all, truly independent, ad-free, and alive in the hands of its readers.

Subscribe now

⟡ What is your AI policy? ⟡

We do not publish AI-generated stories or essays. Writing is an act of imagination, research, and memory—one mind reaching for another. Artists hold the pulse of the human condition in a way machines never will. They catch what algorithms miss—the contradictions, hesitations, tiny human errors that turn into revelation. An artist’s work carries the weight of lived time, of memory and forgetting, grief and joy that can’t be squeezed into a template.

For that reason, we only publish work written by humans. We’re utterly uninterested in outsourcing imagination. Literature has always been a conversation between people across time and place, and we intend to keep it that way.

⟡ Can I pay you to publish my work? ⟡

No. Never. We don’t accept payment for publication, and we never will. If we publish your work, it’s because we love it—not because you paid us. In fact, we pay you.

⟡ What is your greatest fear as a magazine? ⟡

That only writers who want to publish with Strange Pilgrims will care about Strange Pilgrims. We want to be a magazine for readers as much as for writers. While sometimes it can feel that there are often more people practicing literary fiction than those out there seeking to read it…this is more based on hearsay and writerly anxieties than fact.

What’s perhaps closer to the truth is that readers hesitate to pick up writing that hasn’t been vouched for in some way. Without a stellar (and often personal) recommendation, even great stories can drift past unseen.

So, our fear is also our challenge and call to adventure. We want to cultivate a community of readers who step through these strange doors first and foremost for the joy of reading. You are all strange pilgrims—you belong here, as writers, lurkers, subscribers, but hopefully, above all, as readers!

⟡ How can I support Strange Pilgrims? ⟡

Start with the simplest and most important thing: read what we publish. Let the stories and essays live in your mind for a while, carry them with you on your walk to work, mention them at dinner. Share them—with a friend, a stranger, an enemy. Teach what we publish. Be an engaged reader—leave comments, write us letters, tell us what a story made you feel/think, restack what moves you.

And, finally, if you have the means to do so, consider a paid subscription—it’s how we keep the lights on.

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We’re thrilled you’ve decided to be part of our strange little literary community.

Strange Pilgrims will officially launch September 21 (Leonard Cohen’s birthday!).

For now, you can find more details our About page.

(lots) more to come,

Shannan & Karan

The Editors