ELJ  Editions is creating a beautiful tear-away desk calendar for 2027, featuring one powerful piece of micro fiction or nonfiction daily. We’d love you to be part of it!

Guidelines:
Send us your micros—fiction or nonfiction. (No poetry.)
250-words max.
20-word bio. The bio submitted will be the bio printed. No updates will be accepted.
Seasonal pieces welcome but micros may be on any topic of your choice.
While we will including several pieces previously published in Emerge Literary Journal, this submission call is for previously unpublished work.
2 micros max per submission.
Multiple submissions welcome!

Payment--one calendar.

Submissions are rolling until the calendar is filled!

Edited by Diane Gottlieb

Submissions are open for Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and The Meaning of Kinship—an anthology about searching for, learning about, or encountering unknown close family. 

We’re seeking essays about reckoning with the life-altering revelation of long-held family secrets or startling discoveries about your origins—for example learning you have no genetic connection to the person you believed to be your father; you have siblings you never knew about; you have a child about whom you had no knowledge; you discovered in adulthood that you were adopted or donor conceived; or you find your ethnicity or religion is not what you believed it to be. 

Tell us about wrestling with whether to search for your biological relatives and about the outcome if you chose to search.

Write about acceptance and rejection and forging new relationships. Write about the consequences of secrets and shame. Write about how your experience upended everything you thought you knew about yourself, your identity, and your definition of family. 

B.K. Jackson, founder of Severancemag.com, will edit the anthology, and Libby Copeland, author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, will provide a foreword. 

Send us your original 2,000-word essays by November 16, 2025.

Contributors in the U.S. will receive a $25 honorarium, a contributor copy, and discounts on additional copies. Contributors outside the U.S. will receive the honorarium and a digital copy. 

"A story is a complete dramatic action..." ~ Flannery O'Connor

ELJ Editions appreciates the difficult writers have in placing longer stories. We want quality fiction that grabs us and doesn't let go. Stories we wish we had written. We're looking for characters, plot, stories, etc. Keep us engaged by maintaining focus and forward momentum. We want voice, experimental, you name it. We'll consider most genres and cross-genres so long as it has deep literary undertones to it. Please no romance or erotica.

ELJ Editions is currently accepting submissions of single author, single stories of 10,000-25,000 words for ebook/print publication.



STORY MUST BE PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED IN ANY LENGTH.
WORD COUNT MUST BE INCLUDED ALONG WITH A SHORT SYNOPSIS.