~Friends of The Disappointed Housewife ~ Now that we’re a few months past our five-year anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lady at the top of our home page—how steadfast she is, how stern but fully loving, just like the kind of mom who turns out a Greta Thunberg, a Michelle Obama, or… Read More Contest: Help name our disappointed housewife!

The Disappointed Housewife is delighted to announce that Lynn Mundell’s terrific flash story, “Centaurs in the Laundromat,” has been chosen to appear in the Best Microfiction 2023 Anthology. This is our second award since our inception, and we’re awfully proud to be able to offer a platform for works like Lynn’s so more readers can… Read More Best Microfiction selects one of ours!

And now for our final nominations for the 2022/2023 awards season: Sonder Press’s Best Small Fictions. A couple of years ago, one of our stories, The Apparitions by Kirsty McGrory, was chosen by the judges, so we’re on their radar. It’s nice to know that we’re reaching a wider audience thanks to that honor, but… Read More Best Small Fictions Nominations 2023

Attention, readers of The Disappointed Housewife: As our fifth year of publication comes to an end, we’re finally on Facebook. At the urging of a recent contributor, we thought we might as well go ahead and at least attempt to increase our readership by connecting with thousands of readers and writers there who have no… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is now on Facebook

For the first time, The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate a few works for the annual Best Microfiction competition. This one has a 400-word limit, so I’ve been remiss in combing through our archives to find eligible pieces. We have a nice debut stable of short fiction for the 2023 prize:   Now Look… Read More Best Microfiction 2023 Nominations

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2023 Pushcart Prizes: FICTION How to Vanquish the Demon Raktabīja ~ Emily Hoover From the 2354 Galaxy Museum Exhibition of Lost Civilizations ~ Andrea Marcusa Forbidden Fruit ~ Karen Schauber POETRY Painting Party at an Indian Buffet ~ Megan Denese Mealor… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2023

It’s hard to believe, but The Disappointed Housewife is five years old this month. Our first piece was published on November 30, 2017—that is, our first piece by someone other than me. I had contributed a faux book review to get the ball rolling a couple of weeks earlier. I remember back then wanting to… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is 5 Years Old!

Now that The Disappointed Housewife has quite a few miles on its odometer, it’s time to announce a change in our submission requirements. Prose pieces should now come in under 1000 words. Different editors have different ideas of what flash fiction and CNF are—some, unreasonably, I think, limiting it to less than 500 words—but here… Read More New Prose Word Limit

Once again, The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to announce her nominations for this year’s Best of the Net competition. It’s always a pleasure to review the pieces we’ve published through the contest eligibility period (July 1 through June 30) and to be reminded of the wonderful variety of poetry, flash fiction, and essays we’re lucky… Read More 2022 Best of the Net Nominations

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased once again to nominate writers published in our virtual pages this year for the The Best Small Fictions anthology, assembled annually by Sonder Press. Our nominees are: Why I’m Angry ~ fiction by Brooke Brannon Reddit: Am I the Asshole? ~ Reddit thread by Caity Scott Two Micro Stories ~ fiction by… Read More Best Small Fictions Nominations 2022

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2022 Pushcart Prizes: FICTION Why I’m Angry ~ Brooke Brannon But Who’s Counting? ~ Michael Cocchiarale Reddit: Am I the Asshole? ~ Caity Scott POETRY Sex Dream ~ Syreeta Muir Game Night ~ Julie Allyn Johnson Letter to Bernadette Mayer ~… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2022

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased (and proud) to announce that Kirsty McGrory’s flash fiction, “The Apparitions,” has been selected to appear in the 2021 Best Small Fictions Anthology, published by The Sonder Press. Read Kirsty’s excellent story, published last May. And here’s her bio: “Kirsty McGrory is a writer from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her writing has… Read More Look for The Disappointed Housewife in the 2021 Best Small Fictions Anthology!

One of the greatest pleasures I get as editor of your The Disappointed Housewife is opening an unsolicited submission and finding a piece that really “gets” our mission. My grin broadens as I read it, each line telling me that this writer is a natural at what we want to publish: We’re looking for stories… Read More What to Send to The Disappointed Housewife ~ editorial plea by Kevin Brennan

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2021 Pushcart Prizes: FICTION: “Mid-Januinary Radio Jam” by Jim Meirose “The Hopskotch King” by Jake Sheff “The Apparitions” by Kirsty McGrory POETRY: “Oranges (for Frank O’Hara) by Christina M. Rau “If I seem distracted, I’m working on my party trick” by… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2021

The Disappointed Housewife is looking for fiction, poetry, and essays that address the coronavirus pandemic, quarantine, social distancing, and other consequences of the world’s public health crisis. Where there’s trouble, there’s fodder for art. Submissions must meet our offbeat needs and adhere to our usual guidelines. Show us how these extraordinary times have inspired you… Read More Call for Pandemic Submissions

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following pieces for the 2020 Sonder Press The Best Small Fictions anthology: “An Uninspired Kidnapping” by Lucy Zhang “The Saran Wrappers” by Xenia Taiga “How to Properly Distinguish Between a False Mermaid and a Genuine One” by Hiya Mukherjee “The Procedure” by Jeremy Stuart “[I really miss… Read More The Best Small Fictions nominations

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2020 Pushcart Prize (click on titles to view each work): FICTION: “Destination Bulgaria” by Jim Meirose “The Saran Wrappers” by Xenia Taiga “How to Properly Distinguish Between a False Mermaid and a Genuine One” by Hiya Mukherjee POETRY: “Love Letter to… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations

I “sat down” with flash-fiction writer, Jim Harrington, recently to answer some questions about how The Disappointed Housewife got started and what we’re looking for from writers. Pay Jim’s blog, “Six Questions For …”, a visit and have a look at our needs and wants. Best advice? Read our submission guidelines and stay offbeat! Six… Read More Q & A on what The Disappointed Housewife is looking for

Just over a year ago, I launched The Disappointed Housewife with an eye toward gathering nuggets of writing that perhaps couldn’t be found elsewhere. I had some particular kinds of works in mind, works that took the generally accepted rules of form and style and bent them into new shapes like literary balloon animals. I… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is One Year Old!

The Disappointed Housewife is delighted to announce our first payment to writers thanks to the generosity of the readers. Last month I created a “starving artists” fund, to which readers can make donations via PayPal. A convenient “donate” button is located in the sidebar to the right. And since the fund’s creation, we’ve collected a… Read More Dough!

When The Disappointed Housewife launched, I tried to think of ways the contributors could get paid when I had no budget. I landed on the idea of PayPal “tips” made by readers directly to the writers. But this is a hit-and-miss approach and probably leaves most of the writers with little or no acknowledgment. I… Read More Help Pay Our Writers With a Donation to The Disappointed Housewife

There aren’t many ways that a journal that makes no money can pay its writers, but here at The Disappointed Housewife we offer readers an opportunity to bypass the middle man and pay the writers directly. At the bottom of many of our poems, stories, and essays you’ll find the author’s PayPal (or Google Pay)… Read More How to Pay Writers at The Disappointed Housewife

At the outset here, we’re making the choice not to decorate contributions with images, unless the image is made and provided by the author. It seems to us that ubiquitous stock photos all over the internet lower the value of images and detract from a more important element: the writing itself. We see, in fact,… Read More A note on images

The Disappointed Housewife is a literary journal for writers, and readers, who are seeking something different. We like the idiosyncratic, the iconoclastic, the offbeat, the hard-to-categorize. Out of the universe of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, we want to attract work that plays with form and presentation. Work that’s not just outside the box but… Read More Editor’s foreword