Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Debt

March 8, 2012 •

Tell us your stories of a debt that was held, paid, or forgotten. Review a book or film that says something meaningful about those of us who owe money or something more. Send us interviews, profiles, and photos of people and groups that bring new meaning to the age-old relationship between debtor and creditor.

Call for Submissions: The Kindness of Strangers

November 5, 2011 •

Tell us about those who have touched other people and made a difference — even if in passing. Describe your encounters with good samaritans as you were traveling, going through an ordeal, or just living everyday life. Share with us the kinds of stories that can turn a cynic's heart.

Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Rebirth

October 24, 2011 •

To celebrate a rejuvenation of our own — the launch of our revamped site in December — In The Fray magazine would like to explore stories of rebirth. Send us your tales of people who have started over. Tell us stories of redemption in the face of long odds. We’re looking for pieces that demonstrate the transformative power of a new beginning. Think broadly about the topic and get creative.

Editor's Blog

It's hard to think of another role with as much impact as being a mother and father. For almost every other position, we are replaceable in the long term. Someone else will do our job, for better or worse, if we're not there to do it. Someone else will eventually start our company or make our invention or sketch out our idea. Maybe it won't happen for a long time; maybe it would have happened earlier, if we weren't around to slow things down. But eventually, society makes progress, and the niches of innovation — in business or technology, art or politics — are filled.

The stories we're featuring on the site now touch upon the impact that fathers have — even in their absence. In Learned at My Father's Feet, Kae Dickson remembers her experience caring for her "Daddy" at the end of his life, as dementia robbed him of his memories and independence. In A Circle, Broken, Amy O'Loughlin reviews a family memoir by CNN journalist Mark Whitaker, who describes his complicated relationship with his absentee father, an African American scholar who blazed trails only to see his career burn out amid his struggles with alcoholism.

This week the magazine is featuring a trio of articles about prisons, real and psychological. In Freed, but Scarred, Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald describes the post-prison lives of three men who spent, among them, forty-three years in New York penitentiaries for crimes they did not commit. In an accompanying photo essay, Life after Innocence, Dana Ullman presents intimate portraits of the three men and their families, still scarred by absences and regrets. Finally, in Across Oceans, Haunted by Memories, Susan M. Lee reviews the novel "The Reeducation of Cherry Truong," a tale of two Vietnamese families flung across the globe, chased by their war-era remembrances of traumas endured and wrongs perpetrated — at times, on each other.