Join the Written Tales community for writers. Submit your work, receive a permanent author page, take part in monthly writing challenges, and publish with a literary community where the writing comes first.

Mark Ready revisits a Halloween night thick with rain, headlights, and superstition. A child’s excitement meets something large and winged, cutting through the dark, shifting the night’s direction.

L. Keith writes from inside a body frozen mid-plea, where laughter becomes assault, breath collapses inward, and silence swells until it feels like the only voice left.

Susan Spilecki’s poem warms grief into something new—flame, breath, and the slow melting of what once felt immovable, reshaped in the glow of another’s arms.

Join the Written Tales community for writers. Submit your work, receive a permanent author page, take part in monthly writing challenges, and publish with a literary community where the writing comes first.

Phoenix Lilly writes through the ache of distance, her language breaking as she walks familiar streets while her husband remains half a world away, holding the fears she can’t name aloud.

Susan Cornford mirrors two figures preparing for a moment that will throw them into separate brilliance—one behind velvet, one behind a hood—each bracing for the split-second when darkness breaks.

Riley Kilmore’s poem moves through the Mekong Delta, where a soldier strings his gun with ribbons from a friend’s care package and tastes the cookies they opened before grief could settle in.

John Grey’s poem follows a quiet morning where light settles on a table, a steaming cup, and a long-unread letter that the woman reads mostly through her fingers instead of her eyes.

At the sink, she pauses before her own reflection, fingertip searching for a stubborn crumb, the faint tremble in the glass revealing more than the dry cracker or song ever could.

Join the Written Tales community for writers. Submit your work, receive a permanent author page, take part in monthly writing challenges, and publish with a literary community where the writing comes first.

Rain hammers through the night as she stands among flooded fields, feeling his absence rise like another storm, every memory sharp as the wind that swept his face from her world.

A husband’s calm voice fills the small living room as twins doze in her arms. The chair across from her, once her grandmother’s, frames the weight of what he says next.

Paul Munguia’s prose piece “A Life Like A Tree” offers a contemplative vision of existence rooted in simplicity and steadfastness. By comparing life to a tree, the narrative reflects on a deep…

Isabella Melians writes of loss in a language not her own, where faith, heritage, and womanhood intertwine in aching fragments of memory, lit by the pale glow of remembrance and belonging.

Five ordinary words. One tight constraint. Write a 99-word story or a poem that uses every single one, or fail the mission.

Donna Faulkner captures the intimate moment of a father’s passing through spare, aching language—a meditation on memory, mortality, and the small rituals that keep love breathing after death.

Kev’s searing poem voices the pain of a daughter lost to honor violence. Through innocence and horror, her cry exposes the cruelty that hides behind tradition.

Join the Written Tales community for writers. Submit your work, receive a permanent author page, take part in monthly writing challenges, and publish with a literary community where the writing comes first.

Five ordinary words. One tight constraint. Write a 99-word story or a poem that uses every single one, or fail the mission.

Alan Bern turns an accident into scripture. A slip, a fall, a crooked frame—each misalignment a small reminder that grace often arrives slightly off-center.

Join the Written Tales community for writers. Submit your work, receive a permanent author page, take part in monthly writing challenges, and publish with a literary community where the writing comes first.

Linda Crate writes of bills, chains, and the hunger to wander unowned. Her poem breathes against walls built by wealth and names freedom the body’s first language.

Maggie D. Brace writes through the slow erosion of self. Pets, rain, and fading names encircle the speaker as she feels the “I” dissolve inside shared memory’s soft twilight.

Cameron Morse writes through physical falter—muscle, gravity, and the slow slide of a leg that won’t obey. A dead cicada crowns the moment with summer’s quiet ending.

Five ordinary words. One tight constraint. Write a 99-word story or a poem that uses every single one, or fail the mission.

Evie Groch imagines spring and autumn disguising themselves—sandals for sweaters, blossoms for crisp air—until the world stops reacting, leaving the seasons bewildered and strangely tender in their…

Notty Bumbo’s poem reflects on those gone and the traces they leave. Between loss and wonder, he searches for meaning under endless moons.

Five ordinary words. One tight constraint. Write a 99-word story or a poem that uses every single one, or fail the mission.

One skull, two bees, and a Prince who has lost the plot. David Sydney gives Hamlet’s graveyard scene a ridiculous new direction.

What happens when you grow up believing you were the reason your mother left? ibadah asiyah ata writes on the weight of abandonment and the power of finally choosing yourself.

Orange peels on black leather. A sickle shaped moon and a blue light flickers on a bridge. Francois Vernier’s “Sepping Out” catches a woman in a moment that can go one of two ways.

A quiet return to a mountain cabin in the first snow. But some memories don’t just linger—they strike. Jeral Williams’ “As Leaves Turn So Do We.”…

The jungle demands a price from those who walk the blind path. Bob Bussey enters the mist and refuses to pay. “Jungle of Life.”…

A lens tracks a dying flame atop a splintered crossing. One erratic step precedes a sudden, heavy silence where a man once stood. Deidre Greer: “Night Watch.”…

The Eiffel Tower glows above the Seine, while in the market stalls below, people scavenge. Birgit Solvsten D’Alpoim recalls a side of post-war Paris the postcards hide.

Foxes roam, and cardinals call while the snow falls in a steady beat. Yifei Wang observes the shivering joy of a town turned white.

Five ordinary words. One tight constraint. Write a 99-word story or a poem that uses every single one, or fail the mission.

Francois Vernier drops us into Glastonbury, where drunken crowds laugh at the rain, the mud gets deeper, and something about the whole scene begins to feel odd.

A desperate robber challenges a fortuneteller who already knows his future—but the prediction she reveals may be more confusing than the gun in his hand.

A chaotic drive through New York City becomes an unexpected journey into family, memory, and the moments that quietly reshape how we see one another.

Join the Written Tales community for writers. Submit your work, receive a permanent author page, take part in monthly writing challenges, and publish with a literary community where the writing comes first.

A writer pauses long enough to notice small scenes—shifting light, careful wings, familiar emotions—each moment offering a place where language might take hold and shape itself into something worth…

Some marriages grow richer with every passing year. Carlisle’s poem gets at what that actually looks like — the vows, the forgiveness, the desire that doesn’t fade.

A writer turns over the messy beginnings of a poem, remembering lessons on structure, distance, and intention as she buries early drafts to see what rises when she finally returns to them.

A Sonoma farmer tends the lemon trees he planted for his wife, one each birthday. Now she’s gone, and the pesticide fog may be to blame.

Written Tales publishes original, unpublished poetry, flash fiction, short fiction, and creative nonfiction from writers around the world. We look for work grounded in specific, concrete imagery…