PFN – Call for Submissions to Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. This Volume’s Theme: Trash

We welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds – from the emerging and unpublished to the established – and especially encourage submissions from those who identify as persons of color, multiracial, indigenous, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and anyone belonging to a community of underrepresented voices.

GENERAL SUBMISSIONS FOR VOL. 13 ARE NOW OPEN! 

Submission period: June 13th to September 12th

Theme: TRASH

What’s worth keeping—and what do we throw away?
What’s tossed aside, but still clings to meaning? What gleams beneath the grime? What rot reveals something raw and real?

For Fatal Flaw Volume 13, we’re rummaging through the discarded, the dirty, the overlooked. We seek submissions with the theme: TRASH.

Send us stories that dig through the landfill of memory. Poems that salvage the sacred from the scraps. We want essays that wade into the messy middle—what society casts off, what people erase, what culture deems disposable. Show us the clutter, the chaos, the compost heap of human experience.

We want art that celebrates the beauty in broken things. Work that interrogates what we devalue—and why. Is it refuse or relic? Waste or warning?

Unpack what’s been buried. Reclaim what’s been trashed. We’re looking for work that’s raw, visceral, and unafraid to get its hands dirty.

We eagerly await your beautifully ruined work.

• Please only submit work that has not been previously published.
• For Fiction and Nonfiction submissions, we consider work between 1,000 – 7,000 words (though for exceptional work we’ll make exceptions). For Flash Fiction submissions, we consider work between 100 – 1,000 words. For Poetry submissions, we consider up to 3 poems at a time (not to exceed 6 pages total. Please note that we rarely accept any poem longer than 2 pages.)
• Please only submit one piece to one category during each submission period.
• We aim to highlight as many new voices as possible. If you’ve been published with us before, please wait at least one issue before submitting again.
• When formatting prose, please double space, use Times New Roman font and 1″ margins, number your pages and include your name and the title of your work on the first page of the document. When formatting poetry, please put all poems into one single-spaced document. Each poem should start on a new page with titles and lines left aligned (unless the poem involves special formatting, in which case, do your thing – we love seeing space on a page reenvisioned).
• In your cover letter, please include the word count of your piece, your name, the title of your work, any relevant previous publications, and any applicable social media links.

Submissions fee: $3