[Read more →]

Use the following video clip to inspire your next piece of flash fiction. If this doesn’t strike a chord, you shouldn’t be writing anyway:

[Read more →]

Soft nursing
5 solid minutes
of purr
paw peddling
like a kayak competitor
against ripples of my
60 year old river rib cage–
I feel like a nursing mother
but I’m male and I have no nipples.
Sometimes I feel afloat.
Nikki is a little black skunk,
kitten, suckles me for milk,
or affection?
But she is 8 years old a cat.
I’m her substitute mother,
afloat in a flower [...]

[Read more →]

Your financial support is invaluable. Please subscribe to read the most current literary works featured on One Real Story. Your contributions allow us to work towards becoming a paying market to pay our writers for their hard work and help One Real Story to provide the best in contemporary literature. Thank you! You must [...]

[Read more →]

Discussion on Harold Brodkey’s short story Spring Fugue
Jeffrey Eugenides reads Harold Brodkey’s short story Spring Fugue and discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Listen to the mp3 on the player above.
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

[Read more →]

short story submissions
E-Mail the submission to submissionsa@eastoftheweb.com. The subject of the email must consist only of the words ‘EoTW Submission‘ or the words ‘Short Story …
Writing Guidelines
We’re happy to consider stories whether they’re submitted as competition entries or standard submissions, for which there are no reading fees. …
Boston Review — Contest
Send submissions to:. Short-Story Contest, [...]

[Read more →]

Crippled with arthritis
and Alzheimer’s,
in a dark rented room
Charley, plays
melancholic melodies
on a dust filled
harmonica he
found abandoned
on a playground of sand
years ago by a handful of children
playing on monkey bars.
He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,
peeing takes forever; he feeds the cat when
he doesn’t forget where the food is stashed at.
He hears bedlam [...]

[Read more →]

One Real Story is going to a conference for three days. But don’t worry, we’ll be up and running when I get back. Keep writing and get in those submissions.
The Editor

[Read more →]

The New Yorker: Awake
by Tobias Wolff
I was highly impressed with Awake by Tobias Wolff all the way through the read. It catches you initially by reminding you of the days when you too had to struggle through the Odyssey. The fumbling while reading through chapters and the flash when the light bulb finally goes [...]

[Read more →]

fiction writers - now accepting short story submissions

Your short fiction can be submitted to submissions@underthisredrock.com - Please review the site philosophy and read a few stories to get an idea of the …

DarkHart Press: Submissions

We are now closed for submissions to THE TERRIBLE BEAUTY, … We do accept short story submissions via email—but ONLY for [...]

[Read more →]

Variation: Kill your babies (Albert Herring)
Some attribute this quote, or the slightly different version “Kill all your darlings”, to Mark Twain and some claim that it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said it. However, it was author William Faulkner who said it first and teachers of creative writing, film makers, journalist and other kinds of [...]

[Read more →]

Write a short story. The title of your story must contain at least three of the following words:

fish
winter
alien
turnip
ashen
travel
calendar
lunchbox
tradition
harmonica
silver

It’s really simple. Write the title, then write the story.
Good Luck!
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

[Read more →]