Stories that examine the truth in the bitterness, in the anti-heroes. Heavy stories full of grit and discomfort that shed sympathetic light on the questionable, the unfavorable. Stories that ask difficult questions, that provide difficult answers.

We want others to feel the difficulty in a pained existence—to feel the dance between concreteness and ambiguity, between wellness and illness, between acceptance and resistance. To feel what we feel, to feel what others feel who might be unable to express or to share widely what they experience. They look away, most people. Too many writers gloss over the details, the harsh realities, the pain and suffering, whether overt or buried beneath the mundane. They fear alienating the reader because they don’t know how to make this pain and suffering accessible without making it trite or overdone (or offensive); they don’t know how to reach a reader who might not want to know how it feels. Not really. Not on those deep levels. Instead, they make it a spectacle, a tragedy. Or they simply refer to it as just that: pain and suffering, no more, no less.

We want our readers to feel this pain when they read your words. We want our readers to suffer with the characters, with us; please don’t leave out the details. Send us stories of all sizes and shapes that make someone else—someone even like us, like you—pause, put down the piece, shudder and walk away, but then, even if this reader never finds the strength to return, she cannot erase from her mind the feelings brought on by the words. She can’t deny the impact. She thinks about it, she comes back to it at the strangest of times, even unbidden. It is now a tangible thing, taking up physical space within her mind.

We also must balance this severity, this desire for an honesty that borders on the grotesque, the gratuitous, the voyeuristic: We must walk that line, make our readers look without forcing them to participate in something damaging—inspire emotion, not pity. Send us the stories and experiences you wrote because they needed to be written, not for the sake of violence or sexuality or self-aggrandizement. Help us push readers into ambiguity, into darkness, within which we can glimpse humanity and light where we might not have looked for it.