Consequence: Young Writers Nonfiction Project 2026 Free Tip Jar Option

For this young writers’ project, the journal is looking for nonfiction pieces from writers aged fifteen to twenty-four that in some way connect an experience of the consequences of war or geopolitical violence and food, i.e., a dish, a meal, a recipe, an ingredient, a cooking ritual, a food memory that has endured despite how war, conflict, or displacement has touched your life or your family's.

Why food? A recipe is a kind of archive. Food helps us remember. A smell can carry a home life or period of one’s past inside it. Also, writing toward the table lets you approach big experiences like loss, survival, identity, and belonging without having to narrate the hardest parts head-on. It helps you decide how close to the fire you want to write.

We’re looking for your reflections on what’s hidden in a recipe, carried across a border, tasted on an anniversary no one names aloud. We hope you'll start with the food, its heat, the hands that made it, and then let those memories open outward. Think about what this dish or that ingredient reveals about your family, your culture, and who you are. What's been lost, changed, or reinvented: a missing ingredient, a shortcut, a new country's version of an old dish? And most of all: what has this food experience taught you? An essay can hold grief and joy at once. Celebration and humor have their places in the pages of Consequence just as much as anything else. This project is about remembering how much the ordinary counts. Along with essays, the issue may include photographs and videos depicting food memories.

• 12 pt font with 1" margins
• < 4,000 words

Questions? Please contact our Nonfiction Editor at non[email protected]