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Unstaged Magazine is seeking experimental 1-minute plays, monologues, poems, stories and other theatrical moments for publication in our upcoming themed-edition.  

On the Theme: Burn This Script

The theme is fire. What do you see when you stare into it? Fire in the landscape, and the ghost stories we tell while burning our marshmallows. 

Erasure. Censorship. The melting of ICE.

I read somewhere that pamphlets used to fall from the sky. Ironically, these were missives from the underground. Reading them could get you expelled from any decent school. What was in those pamphlets? 

When my mother was just a child, their apartment on Main Street was caught in a terrible fire. I think about this more often than necessary. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Fires happen. Once, I showed up to the aftermath of a house fire with another Red Cross volunteer. It was this family standing in the street and their life had turned to carbon and all we could give them was a blanket, a stack of phone numbers, and a few hundred dollars cash. That one was somebody’s fault. Actually, it was the son’s off-brand hoverboard that had basically exploded. This is a true story. 

You can’t fire me, I quit.

Remember HTML message boards, back when the internet wasn’t trying to kill everybody? Submit something anonymous if you want. Submit something.

The Finer Details

We only publish unproduced work, but will consider a piece that's been workshopped or read. We prioritize short-form originals but will consider excerpts on a case-by-case basis.

We’re looking for a page or two, maybe 500 words max. The shorter the piece, the better the chances of publication, but feel free to send longer work if you truly can’t help yourself and we’ll see what we can do.

We can’t pay contributors yet, but we’re working on it. We’d be happy to offer other forms of support for contributors like beta reading or promoting your other projects on social. Let’s talk.

Submission Deadline: when the clock strikes midnight on May 31st, 2026 our submission window turns back into a pumpkin.

To submit, send your work and a short bio to submissions@unstagedmagazine.org

Postscript: In addition to digital publication, we would be thrilled to publish this edition in print (paper burns much easier than MacBook). This will hinge on the amount of submissions we receive and our ability to gather funds. Stay tuned.