A Million Little Delights

WORD COUNT: Short fiction: 500–1,000 words. Poetry: up to 400 words.
PAYMENT: Short fiction is paid at $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Poetry is paid at a flat rate of $30 per accepted poem. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking short fiction and poetry that lingers.

We love work with a strong voice, vivid atmosphere, emotional complexity, and something alive beneath the surface. Give us characters we can't quite shake, images that stay with us, sentences we want to read twice, and poems that make us notice something differently.

We're open to work that is tender, funny, strange, romantic, unsettling, nostalgic, joyful, melancholy, playful, or some impossible combination of all of the above.

Above all, we want writing that makes us feel something.

The spirit we're after:

Nectar & Noose — a story about racism, Black womanhood, and the complicated act of remaining soft in a world that continually asks you to harden.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, emotional depth, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

For short fiction

We're drawn to character-driven stories with distinctive voices, compelling relationships, memorable settings, and emotional stakes.

Your story doesn't need an enormous plot. We're just as interested in what happens around a kitchen table, during a strange afternoon, between two old friends, or inside one consequential conversation as we are in larger narratives.

We're open to literary fiction, romance, speculative elements, humor, magical realism, and work that doesn't fit neatly into a category.

What matters most is that the story feels specific and inhabited.

For poetry

Send us poems with imagery, voice, feeling, and attention to language.

We're interested in poems about ordinary life and extraordinary moments, relationships, place, memory, identity, desire, beauty, grief, pleasure, girlhood, womanhood, family, friendship, home, change, and subjects we haven't thought to ask for yet.

We welcome experimentation, but we're especially drawn to poetry that invites the reader in rather than making her prove she belongs there.

What we're not looking for

We're not searching for work that simply matches an aesthetic or uses “cozy” as shorthand for substance.

Delight can exist beside grief. Beauty can exist beside anger. A story published in A Million Little Delights doesn't have to be cheerful.

It should simply have something worth noticing.

Send us the story or poem we’ll still be thinking about tomorrow.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking warm, personal stories about making a home feel like your own.

We're interested in homes as lived-in places—not pristine rooms designed for photographs. The lamp you searched six months for. The gallery wall that keeps growing. The dinner plates inherited from your grandmother. The reading corner you squeezed into a tiny apartment. The ridiculous amount of effort you put into making your bedroom feel like a boutique hotel.

We want stories about creating atmosphere, collecting things you love, developing rituals at home, decorating on your own terms, and figuring out what makes a space feel good to live in.

The spirit we're after:

I'm on a Mission to Make My Texas Apartment Feel Like an NYC Flat — an ongoing experiment involving moodier lighting, collected art, overflowing bookshelves, interesting textiles, and figuring out how to create the feeling of a much older city apartment inside a very different space.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Pitch us the specific homemaking story, rather than general decorating advice.

Maybe you're slowly furnishing your entire apartment secondhand. Maybe you became obsessed with recreating your grandmother's kitchen. Maybe you've declared war on overhead lighting. Maybe you host elaborate dinners despite owning a table that technically seats four. Maybe you've spent years collecting mismatched floral plates. Maybe you're figuring out how to make a temporary rental feel permanent without painting a single wall.

We're interested in interiors, collecting, decorating, entertaining, domestic rituals, small-space living, secondhand finds, seasonal traditions, DIY projects, unconventional homes, and the wonderfully particular ways people make spaces their own.

Your home doesn't need to be large, expensive, professionally decorated, or finished. We're far more interested in personality than perfection.

Give us the story behind the room, object, ritual, collection, or project. Tell us why you care about it. Let us see the decisions, experiments, mistakes, compromises, and tiny triumphs along the way.

We want homes that look and feel like somebody actually lives there.

Show us what makes yours unmistakably yours.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking stories about trying things, making things, following curiosities, and giving yourself permission to be a beginner.

We're interested in what happens when you take an idea you've been carrying around and actually do something about it—especially when you have no particular reason to believe you'll be good at it.

Take the pottery class. Audition for community theater. Learn to sew your own dress. Join the choir. Spend a month painting tiny watercolors. Try improv. Make pasta by hand. Plant the absurdly ambitious garden. Learn the dance you've watched other people do a hundred times.

You don't need to become excellent at any of it.

That's kind of the point.

The spirit we're after:

I Signed Up for a Stand-Up Comedy Class Because I've Never Made a Whole Room Laugh — what happened when I decided to try something I had absolutely no evidence I'd be good at.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

We're looking for stories about creativity in practice, not general advice about living creatively.

Pitch us the experiment.

What did you decide to try? Why that particular thing? What happened when you actually showed up? What surprised you? What went embarrassingly wrong? What did you discover that you couldn't have known from the sidelines?

We're especially interested in hobbies, classes, creative experiments, unusual skills, abandoned interests picked back up, ambitious little projects, and pursuits undertaken primarily because they sounded fun.

The experience doesn't need to result in a transformation. You don't need to turn your new hobby into a business, become exceptionally talented, or conclude with a tidy lesson about believing in yourself.

In fact, we'd rather you didn't.

We're interested in creativity that exists outside achievement and productivity—the pleasure of making something, learning something, getting a little better at something, or simply discovering that you'd like to do it again.

Bring us personality, specificity, curiosity, mishaps, discoveries, and the details that make your particular experiment yours.

Be bad at something. Get curious. Tell us what happened.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking sharp, curious cultural essays about the places, objects, rituals, trends, technologies, aesthetics, and shared experiences that quietly shape how we live.

We're interested in writers who notice the significance hiding inside things other people might dismiss as ordinary, frivolous, outdated, or too specific to matter.

The mall. The group chat. Department-store perfume counters. Pinterest weddings. Sleepovers. The disappearance of magazine racks. The return of the digital camera. Reality television reunions. Hotel breakfast buffets. The particular intimacy of getting ready together. The elaborate social politics of the neighborhood Facebook group.

If you can't stop thinking about it, we might want to read about it.

The spirit we're after:

Whatever Happened to the Mall? — an essay about teenage girlhood, third places, Auntie Anne's, dressing rooms, and the strange intimacy of spending an entire Saturday at the mall.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

We're drawn to pieces that start with something specific and use it to ask a bigger question.

Don't just tell us that something is nostalgic—tell us why we're nostalgic for it.

Don't simply announce that a trend is back—tell us what its return reveals about the moment we're living in.

And don't feel obligated to choose something conventionally important. Part of the fun is taking seemingly unserious subjects seriously enough to discover what they can tell us.

We're interested in history, memory, aesthetics, technology, entertainment, consumer culture, womanhood, friendship, leisure, domestic life, the internet, and the changing ways we gather and spend our time.

Bring us a point of view, not just an observation.

We love writing that is intelligent but accessible, well-observed, specific, surprising, funny when it wants to be, and willing to follow an odd question somewhere worthwhile.

Tell us about the thing everyone recognizes but nobody has stopped to examine yet.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

Practical and inspiring pieces about gathering people, building friendships, hosting, traditions, celebrations, and meaningful connection.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking smart, intimate, deeply curious features and interviews about women, creativity, culture, work, reinvention, unusual lives, and the choices people make about how they want to live.

We’re especially interested in stories that get beyond the polished bio. We want the detours, obsessions, risks, contradictions, strange beginnings, abandoned plans, unexpected pivots, and small decisions that make someone's life genuinely interesting.

Think less “10 Questions With…” and more “I spent an afternoon with this fascinating woman and came away seeing something differently.”

We're drawn to subjects who have something specific to say or whose lives open the door to a larger conversation. They don't need to be famous. In fact, we're particularly interested in people doing interesting things outside the usual spotlight: artists, makers, collectors, writers, designers, entrepreneurs, craftspeople, researchers, restaurateurs, archivists, hobbyists, travelers, community-builders, and women pursuing wonderfully specific interests.

The spirit we're after:

The Women Who Actually Went After the Dream — intimate conversations with women who left established careers to pursue creative callings, exploring not only what they gained but what it actually cost, surprised them, frightened them, and changed them.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This idea is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Pitch us the specific story, not simply the person you'd like to interview.

Tell us who she is, why you're interested in her, what makes this story right for A Million Little Delights, and—most importantly—what you want to find out.

We're looking for pieces that leave the reader with more than information. We want curiosity, personality, intimacy, specificity, and the feeling that we've been invited into a conversation worth lingering over.

Warm, intelligent, surprising, funny, tender, slightly eccentric, culturally curious—we're open to all of it.

Give us something we didn't know we wanted to know.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking literary and bookish essays for people who don't simply finish books—they carry them around in their heads.

We want writing that begins with literature and wanders somewhere interesting: into your own life, an uncomfortable question, a relationship, an obsession, a memory, an idea you can't shake, or something a fictional character made you recognize about yourself.

These aren't traditional book reviews, and you don't need to be an academic or professional critic. We're interested in what happens when a book escapes the boundaries of its pages and collides with real life.

The spirit we're after:

Am I Sula? — a personal reckoning with freedom, friendship, selfishness, and the uncomfortable parts of myself I recognize in Toni Morrison's Sula.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Give us a compelling question, tension, or connection.

Maybe a character you disliked at 19 suddenly makes perfect sense at 35. Maybe you've spent years trying to recreate a meal described in a childhood favorite. Maybe reading one particular novel changed the way you understood your mother. Maybe you're fascinated by the apartments of women in literature, the books fictional characters read, or why a certain story has followed you through three completely different versions of yourself.

We're open to the canonical and contemporary, beloved and obscure, highbrow and deliciously unserious.

What matters is that there's an idea beyond “I loved this book.”

We want pieces with personality and intellectual curiosity—writing that can be analytical without becoming academic and personal without losing sight of the work itself.

Make us want to underline something.

Make us reconsider a character we thought we understood.

Or make us close your essay and immediately go looking for the book.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking personal essays about the experiences, rituals, relationships, choices, discoveries, embarrassments, experiments, and small turning points that shape a life.

We love essays that begin somewhere specific. A Saturday morning ritual. A friendship that quietly changed. The hobby you became inexplicably obsessed with. The summer you spent saying yes to every invitation. The dress you couldn't throw away. The year you stopped hosting Thanksgiving. The neighborhood walk you've taken hundreds of times and suddenly saw differently.

We're less interested in essays that begin with a lesson the writer wants to teach and more interested in stories that discover what they mean along the way.

We want personality. Scenes. Details. A distinctive point of view. Humor is welcome. So are tenderness, uncertainty, contradiction, nostalgia, delight, and the occasional slightly unhinged personal experiment.

The spirit we're after:

I Started Taking Myself Out to Breakfast — an essay about becoming comfortable with your own company through the small ritual of going out for breakfast alone every Saturday morning.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Send us essays that make the personal interesting to someone who wasn't there.

Rather than pitching “an essay about learning to enjoy being alone,” tell us about the Saturday breakfasts.

Rather than “what friendship taught me about growing older,” tell us about the annual weekend trip four friends have somehow kept alive for fifteen years.

Rather than “why everyone should have hobbies,” tell us why you became obsessed with making miniature furniture at 34.

The small, peculiar details are often where the real story lives.

Above all, we're looking for writing that feels observant, alive, generous, and unmistakably yours. You don't need to have everything figured out by the final paragraph. We'd rather finish your essay feeling like we've experienced something alongside you than feeling like we've been given a lesson.

Surprise us with something only you could have written.

Submit

WORD COUNT: Up to 400 words of accompanying text
PAYMENT: $30 flat rate per accepted photo essay. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking photo essays that tell a story through the details of a place, person, ritual, community, or ordinary day.

We're interested in photography that makes us stop and look more closely—not because everything in the frame is extraordinary, but because the photographer noticed something worth seeing.

A neighborhood waking up. The final day of a family-owned shop. Women getting ready for a wedding. A grandmother's house exactly as she left it. A summer at the community pool. Sunday morning at the flea market. One street photographed at the same hour every day. The rituals of a local diner. The quiet details of someone's creative practice.

We're especially interested in the everyday.

The spirit we're after:

An Ordinary Tuesday in New Orleans — a visual diary documenting an otherwise unremarkable day: morning coffee, laundry hanging from a balcony, the bus ride, corner stores, people encountered along the way, afternoon light, dinner, and the city settling into evening.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, observational quality, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Pitch us a visual story, not simply a collection of your best photographs.

There should be an idea connecting the images. What are you documenting? Why this subject? Why now? What might we understand, notice, or feel after seeing it through your eyes?

We're interested in people, neighborhoods, homes, travel, traditions, food, creative work, collections, local culture, changing places, overlooked spaces, everyday rituals, and subjects we haven't imagined yet.

Your photographs don't need to depict conventionally beautiful things. We care about observation, intimacy, atmosphere, personality, and point of view far more than perfection.

We also welcome accompanying text when it strengthens the piece—an introduction, short reflections, captions, snippets of conversation, or brief observations that give the photographs additional context.

When pitching, tell us what you'd like to photograph, your relationship to the subject (if relevant), and how you envision the finished essay. Please include examples of your photography or a portfolio.

We're looking for photographers who can make an ordinary moment feel worth remembering.

Show us something we might have walked right past.

Submit

Since this call combines short fiction and poetry, we need to distinguish the payment structure because only the poetry gets the $30 flat rate. Based on your existing guidelines, I'd put:

WORD COUNT: Short fiction: 500–1,000 words. Poetry: up to 400 words.
PAYMENT: Short fiction is paid at $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Poetry is paid at a flat rate of $30 per accepted poem. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking short fiction and poetry that lingers.

We love work with a strong voice, vivid atmosphere, emotional complexity, and something alive beneath the surface. Give us characters we can't quite shake, images that stay with us, sentences we want to read twice, and poems that make us notice something differently.

We're open to work that is tender, funny, strange, romantic, unsettling, nostalgic, joyful, melancholy, playful, or some impossible combination of all of the above.

Above all, we want writing that makes us feel something.

The spirit we're after:

Nectar & Noose — a story about racism, Black womanhood, and the complicated act of remaining soft in a world that continually asks you to harden.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, emotional depth, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

For short fiction

We're drawn to character-driven stories with distinctive voices, compelling relationships, memorable settings, and emotional stakes.

Your story doesn't need an enormous plot. We're just as interested in what happens around a kitchen table, during a strange afternoon, between two old friends, or inside one consequential conversation as we are in larger narratives.

We're open to literary fiction, romance, speculative elements, humor, magical realism, and work that doesn't fit neatly into a category.

What matters most is that the story feels specific and inhabited.

For poetry

Send us poems with imagery, voice, feeling, and attention to language.

We're interested in poems about ordinary life and extraordinary moments, relationships, place, memory, identity, desire, beauty, grief, pleasure, girlhood, womanhood, family, friendship, home, change, and subjects we haven't thought to ask for yet.

We welcome experimentation, but we're especially drawn to poetry that invites the reader in rather than making her prove she belongs there.

What we're not looking for

We're not searching for work that simply matches an aesthetic or uses “cozy” as shorthand for substance.

Delight can exist beside grief. Beauty can exist beside anger. A story published in A Million Little Delights doesn't have to be cheerful.

It should simply have something worth noticing.

Send us the story or poem we’ll still be thinking about tomorrow.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

Introduce us to women whose lives inspire others to live more intentionally. We're less interested in celebrity and more interested in character. Profile artists, gardeners, bakers, librarians, teachers, florists, homemakers, entrepreneurs, volunteers, or everyday women whose lives reflect creativity, generosity, hospitality, wisdom, or a deep sense of purpose.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 100–400 words
PAYMENT: $30 flat rate per accepted submission. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking seasonal recipes with a story to tell.

We love food that belongs to a particular moment: the soup you make on the first genuinely cold evening, the cake that appears at every family birthday, the tomato sandwich you wait all year to eat, the elaborate Sunday breakfast worth dirtying every pan for, or the drink that officially means summer has begun.

We're looking for recipes accompanied by personal, narrative writing—pieces that give us something wonderful to read before we ever reach the ingredient list.

The spirit we're after:

The First Cold Sunday of the Year Calls for Chicken & Dumplings! — a seasonal recipe accompanied by a personal reflection on that first unmistakably cold day, the rituals that come with it, and why chicken and dumplings always seem to belong there.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a recipe to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Pitch us the recipe and the story behind it.

Maybe it's the pie your family makes during the two-week window when a particular fruit is perfect. Maybe it's what you cook for friends every New Year's Day. Maybe you spent an entire summer trying to recreate something you ate on vacation. Maybe you've developed the perfect dinner for the night you decorate your Christmas tree. Maybe it's a ridiculously simple snack that somehow became a household tradition.

We're interested in breakfast, dinner, baking, desserts, snacks, drinks, dinner-party food, family recipes, regional specialties, seasonal ingredients, holiday traditions, and recipes invented entirely because you wanted something delicious.

The recipe should be tested, clear, and easy to follow, and the accompanying writing should bring personality, memory, atmosphere, or a sense of occasion to the dish.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking delightfully specific, deeply considered, slightly obsessive lists about things you care about far more than anyone reasonably should.

The more specific, the better.

We're not looking for generic “10 Books Every Woman Should Read” or “7 Ways to Romanticize Your Life” lists. We want the list that could only have been dreamed up by someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the subject.

The spirit we're after:

17 Movie Kitchens I Would Happily Move Into — a very serious consideration of memorable movie kitchens based on coziness, windows, countertops, dinner-party potential, and whether you'd actually want to drink your morning coffee there.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, humor, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Give us a premise that's specific enough to make us immediately want to know what's on the list.

The fictional dinner parties you'd most like to attend. Extremely specific souvenirs actually worth bringing home. Literary characters you'd trust to decorate your apartment. Movie coats that deserve their own character credit. Tiny museums worth planning a trip around. The best foods to eat while standing over the kitchen sink. Fictional towns you'd move to immediately—with one serious reservation about each.

You get the idea.

Or, better yet, give us an idea we wouldn't have thought of at all.

Your list should have a point of view. Each entry should earn its place and include enough writing to make the piece satisfying to read—not simply a collection of names with one-line descriptions.

We're especially drawn to lists that combine humor, cultural observation, nostalgia, expertise, curiosity, or an oddly specific personal obsession.

Take something seemingly trivial seriously.

Take something serious a little less seriously.

Just don't be boring about it.

Tell us what you've been keeping a strangely specific mental list of all these years.

Submit

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking thoughtful, transportive travel stories about what happens when we leave the familiar behind.

We're interested in travel writing with a story at its center—not itineraries, destination roundups, or lists of must-see attractions. Take us somewhere and let us experience it with you.

We want the missed trains, peculiar museums, conversations with strangers, meals you still think about, wrong turns that became the best part of the day, places that weren't what you expected, and journeys that changed because something didn't go according to plan.

You don't need to travel somewhere glamorous or far away to have a story worth telling. A tiny town two hours from home can be every bit as interesting as Paris if you give us a reason to care.

The spirit we're after:

A Solo Train Through Scotland — a narrative travel essay about conversations with strangers and traveling without an itinerary built around “must-sees.”

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

Pitch us a story that happens somewhere, rather than simply a story about somewhere.

Maybe you spent a week visiting every swimming hole in a region your grandmother loved. Maybe an overnight train introduced you to someone unforgettable. Maybe you deliberately traveled without consulting a “best of” list. Maybe you returned to the vacation town your family visited when you were eight and discovered your memory had gotten almost everything wrong.

We're interested in solo travel, local adventures, road trips, trains, cities, small towns, overlooked destinations, return journeys, unusual accommodations, food encountered along the way, and places with stories of their own.

Strong submissions should give us a sense of place. We want texture, atmosphere, people, observations, and details that couldn't simply be transferred to another destination.

We're especially drawn to travel writing that is curious rather than performative. You don't need to prove that a trip transformed you, conquered a fear, or taught you five important lessons.

Sometimes you went somewhere.

Something happened.

And you came home with a very good story.

Take us with you.

Submit