Narrative

Open submission prose rejections

Standard

Thank you for sending your work to Narrative. We are always grateful for the opportunity to review new work, and we have given "__________" close attention and careful consideration. We regret, however, that "__________" does not meet our needs at this time. We hope that you will keep us in mind in the future.

Slightly Higher Tier

Thank you for sending your work to Narrative. We are always grateful for the opportunity to review new material, and we have given "__________" close reading and careful consideration. We found many strengths to recommend your work and, overall, much to admire. We regret, however, that "__________" is not quite right for us. We encourage you try us again in the future, and we hope that you will.

Personal Rejection

Hello __________,

Greetings from Narrative Magazine! We’re contacting you today in regard to your Open Reading Period 2010 submission "__________," which received close and careful consideration from our editorial staff. First of all, we want to thank you for your patience throughout the entire consideration process—we received far more submissions than we’d accounted for, and thus the consideration period was drawn out a bit longer than we would typically prefer. That said, the fact that it has taken this long to respond simply means that your work received a very large amount of attention from all of us here at the magazine.

In the end, we have decided to pass on "__________," but wanted to contact you personally with the hope of soliciting more work from you in the future. Please be assured that your story was very close, and many of our editors fought tooth and nail on its behalf. It’s clear that you’re an excellent writer and we’d love to see more of your writing going forward. Please let us know if you are interested in being in contact with one of our staff members in order to facilitate a more direct line of communication.

Thanks again for sending your work, Blank, we’re certainly honored to have had the chance to consider it for publication. We’ll look forward to hearing back from you and hope you have a wonderful week in the interim.

Best,

The Editors

Contest rejections

Spring 2018 story contest

Standard rejection

Dear __________,

Thank you for entering "__________" in our Spring Contest. We were grateful for the opportunity to read and consider your work, and we regret that your entry was not one of our winners or finalists this time.

We continue to look for engaging new works to publish, and we hope you will keep Narrative in mind for your writing in the future.

Again, thank you for your entry, and please accept our kind wishes.

Sincerely,

The Editors