Letter from the EIC – Hiatus

Hi. So. As of er, now, we are on hiatus because we need a break. Unfortunately.

When T.L., M, and I started Unfortunately, in 2021, we thought we’d get maybe a couple dozen submissions per month. Maybe. The day we announced our existence on social media, we blew up. I suppose we were naïve about how much rejection resonates with people. Or maybe they just liked our ASCII shrug logo. So, when we opened, we got hundreds of submissions, not a couple dozen.

Things got overwhelming for us very quickly, but I wanted to push forward with the magazine anyway, even if it was alone. I did get some amazing help along the way, for which I’m eternally grateful. However, the effort required to run a magazine (especially for free) is massive. Not surprisingly, many new lit mags fold within two years of opening. I never wanted to be part of that statistic, which is why I’m putting it on hiatus instead of shuttering it.

I am so, so thankful to everyone who has helped Unfortunately, come into existence and grow, including:

M Sweeney, Founding Editor
T.L. Thompson, Founding Editor
Edith E. Hammernacker, Submissions Editor
Taylor Franson Thiel, Poetry Editor
David Obuchowski, Guest Fiction Editor
Ashley Mina, Fiction Reader
Blaire Grady, Guest Reader
Kayla Sosa, Guest Reader
Kat Turner, Guest Reader

So, what happens now?

We won’t be reopening submissions for the rest of the year, including July. We hope to reopen submissions sometime next year, but nothing has been set in stone yet.

We will continue to publish the submissions we accept. If we haven’t contacted you yet with a publication date, we will. And thank you for your patience.

If you’ve asked for a status update, the status is that I’m slow, not that we’ve forgotten you.

We will do our best to return the submissions currently in our Submittable box by August 31.

We won’t be responding to feedback requests. Not knowing why someone declined your submission can be frustrating, so I’ve always wanted to give people feedback. Given the current workload, though, we just don’t have the bandwidth.

I believed (and still believe) very strongly in our mission. I’m too sensitive for my own good, so as a writer, I always had trouble processing the rejections I received. I would agonize and overanalyze why I wasn’t good enough, and I hated the toxic positivity of the “a ‘no’ is just one step closer to a ‘yes’!” rhetoric. But I’m completely burned out.

Every morning, every evening, and multiple times throughout the day, for over a year, my brain has enjoyed reminding me how behind I am with Unfortunately, and how that makes me the worst person on the planet. When I do have the time and energy to work on the magazine, I get paralyzed by fear, guilt, and shame. Which is stupid. I need to learn to be less mean to myself.

Hell, I haven’t submitted my own work in well over a year. But what’s far worse is that I barely write anymore. I’ve always loved editing, but I was a writer first. I need to secure my own oxygen mask and suck in that sweet, sweet air on my own for a while.

Nathalie Lawrence
Editor in Chief
Unfortunately,

P.S. If you need other rejection-themed magazines in your life, perhaps you’ll enjoy some of these: