Necessary Fiction Call for Summer Flash Fiction (Deadline May 1)

Necessary Fiction will publish weekly flash fiction each Wednesday for your summer reading enjoyment beginning in June and lasting through Labor Day. Here are 10 things we’ve noticed about our broad aesthetic tendencies over the years:

1. We’re often fans of the absurd, the off-kilter, and the darkly comic.
2. We tend to fall for beautiful language or an unexpected phrase.
3. We’re interested in how a story gets told.
4. We prefer stories that are stories, not static moments or a character’s memories lacking broader context.
5. We’re open to reading the slyly speculative, the strange, the uncanny, and the weird.
6. We love when stories take a risk.
7. We rarely find body part humor all that funny.
8. We publish fiction; please don’t send us poems. We aren’t qualified for those.
9. We find that stories dependent upon very particular pop culture references sail right over our heads.
10. We especially encourage marginalized and traditionally underrepresented writers to submit, though your piece does not have to encompass those themes.