Send us your stories & essays!
Free to submit summer window | Open Submission Call #2
Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I think first off we owe you a small apology as this email is exactly one week late and that’s because, well, things have been overwhelmingly magnificently hectic on our ends. We moved back to Canada on my birthday a few weeks back (I turned 31 and I love it it’s the best!) and ever since then it’s been a cosmic soup of endless settling in.
There’s a bliss to it, of course, and we feel a lot happier (and safer) than when we were in the US, but it also means that some things were just very hard to squeeze into our schedules of working full time, parenting fuller time, and… * gestures at the thing called life *
But not to despair. We are now OFFICIALLY OPEN for our free Summer window. One thing we’ve changed is that you can now send us stories and essays up to 10,000 words as opposed to the previous limit of 5000. All the other details are below in case you need a refresher, or you can just hop on over here to submit (and you might notice our submission portal got a little makeover, so any and all praises for that are heartily welcome ha).
◉ Send us
Short Stories (1001-10,000 words)
Essays / Narrative Nonfiction (1001-10,000 words)
Flash Fiction (100-1000 words)
Flash CNF (100-1000 words)
Each piece will be published alongside a short interview with the author.
◉ Payment
$200 for long-form
$50 for flash
Deadline: July 20, 2026
Eligibility: Open to anyone writing in English, anywhere in the world
Restriction: No previously published work (but self-published on your blog/Substack/etc. is fine!)
Evaluation: All submissions are read by us, Shannan Mann & Karan Kapoor, the editors of Strange Pilgrims (& ONLY POEMS)
Response time: Within 4 months
Optional: $10 Fast Response (response within 4 weeks)
More details on what we’re looking for alongside a list of our favorite writers can be found on our About page.
General 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:
Become a paid subscriber
Leave a tip when submitting
Request paid editorial feedback (via the submission form)
May the alphabet sing to you,
This is awesome; and congrats on the move!! Can I submit during this period if I have a piece still pending from a previous submission window?