Open Calls For Submission
Nonfiction: Fables from the Funemployed
Whether you were waiting tables or sitting behind the front desk, we want to hear stories about your entry-level jobs. Was it funny? Was it awful? What did you learn? Tell us or we'll take it out of your paycheck.
From Nov. 1 to Dec. 30, we're accepting personal memoirs from young writers about their entry-level jobs, past or present.
Prose should be 300 words minimum, 5000 words maximum. If you'd like to send in Poetry, we will accept up to ten poems. Make sure to check our submission guidelines below.
Ready to submit? Click on the button below to send us your work.
Submission Guidelines
- Double-spaced, one-inch margins
- 12pt font, Times New Roman or Garamond
- File types supported: .pdf, .doc, .docx
- All entries should be anonymous; make sure your piece doesn’t contain your name or any identifying details
- Simultaneous submissions are allowed, just let us know immediately if it’s accepted anywhere else
- Multiple submissions to this magazine are allowed
- All submissions should be in English until I become fluent in Spanish 🙂
Responses
Once we've read your piece and made a decision, you'll get a notice via email of either acceptance, rejection, or accepted with copy-edits.
Response times vary. We try to read and respond to pieces as soon as we can, but obviously we have a smaller team at the moment.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Common Concerns & Reasons to Submit Anyway
What if my story isn't entertaining?
Oh, stop it. Besides, the truth is that (surprise, surprise) work is boring.
The point of these pieces isn't to entertain audiences, anyway; the point is to share your authentic experiences in the workplace. So don't worry about crafting a narrative or picking the perfect words as much as you're telling something worthwhile.
So what if it's boring? Show off your skills. We want to see if you can turn the mundane into magic. To turn employment into funemployment (get it? get it?)
What if I'm not a writer?
Perfect! We're not looking for people who consider themselves writers, we're looking for authenticity.
What we want to make is a collection of stories about what it's like to be an entry-level worker in the current day. The hope is that by gathering together all of these experiences, their similarities will reveal something important about what it's like for young people to work these jobs.
And who knows? You might end up enjoying the writing.
What if I don't know where to start?
Starting with a blank page is usually the most difficult part of writing. Don't aim to be perfect, especially for a first draft. Just start writing. Ramble, even. Start typing and see what happens.
Ideally, the story you send in is one you might tell your friends. A story that is engaging but also meant something to you. Even if you consider it boring, when you tell it in the right way it might reveal something even you yourself didn't expect.
What if my story doesn't match what you're looking for?
The criteria for this project is purposefully scant. So long as it's about your job, you could write about a life-changing experience you had or something small.
To narrow it down for you, we want to hear about entry-level roles. Doesn't matter what it was or what you did, but we want to hear specifically about the roles where you were at the bottom of the food chain. At funemployedmag.com, we're looking to hear from writers from Gen Z. The hope is that this collection of stories will display the differences or misconceptions about work in the current day.
