The Village Green Rag: Call for Submissions

While people flee to the bustle of towns and cities, we hold out our site as a global online refuge for storytellers and fellow travelers. We invite writers like you to this village. Seek out our sanctuary and pen a few words on the sward near the hedges and butterflies while the mad world battles on.

We enjoy good writing that is truly felt and doesn't rely on gimmicks. It's as simple and as difficult as seeing and feeling the right words in the right order. Anything that's vivid and rings true is acceptable. Your story should have a logic that creates belief in the world that's been created, no matter how bizarre, and, if it's plotted, it should be done well. We'll take light stuff, if it's good. No sci-fi, fantasy, gothic, genre fiction, commercial stuff, or children's stories. Of course, we don't accept art work, poetry, plays or essays, unless they are part of the story.

The odds on a new writer getting recognized or published are very long. Literary magazines reject 98% of short story submissions. This is the same rate at which book publishers and literary agents reject new writers worldwide. The editors of a popular review which gets up to 20,000 submissions a year only check the pieces that are submitted by literary agents. Interns read the rest. We find that the ones who do get published are established writers who seem to write the same kind of story over and over.

The Rag will just publish contested stories that are 2,000-3,500 words long. This way, we hope to attract and reward the best from all over the world. We'll give three cash prizes and publish the top ten stories in our inaugural issue in 2006 and five more in the subsequent issue. It doesn't matter to us if you've just started writing, don't have an MFA, or that you have 50 books to your credit.

Our world of fiction is without the borders that traditional publishers impose. Our arrangement with PayPal allows you to submit your stories from nearly any country. Send in your contributions from North America, Europe, east, west and south Asia, from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Oceania, and from central and Latin America. We're a cosmopolitan village and can handle submissions from anywhere as long as they are in English. In fact, we'd like new and emerging writers to send us stuff, particularly from places where MFA programs may not exist and whose writers' voices don't often get heard in the new world.

You can write here all you like. Enter our short story contest. We're accepting stories now...