An honest, up-to-date map of good homes for short reflective and creative writing about illness and care — essays, stories, and poems, not academic papers. Last checked early 2026; always confirm current guidelines before you send.

You wrote the piece. Maybe it started as five minutes against a timer and turned into something you cannot stop thinking about. The hardest part is behind you. What remains is a quieter question that stops a great many good pieces from ever reaching a reader: where does this go?

Below is a working guide to the journals and platforms that publish this kind of writing, arranged from the gentlest places to begin to the most competitive. We have kept to venues we know and read, and noted for each what they want, how long a piece should be, whether they pay, and when they read. Guidelines shift, so treat every reading window and word count as a prompt to check the source before you submit.

A few principles before you send anything

Read an issue first. Every editor on this list says the same thing, and they mean it: the surest way to be published is to know what a journal actually publishes. Read three or four pieces before you submit a word.

Protect the people in your writing. If a real patient appears in your piece, you owe them either consent or disguise. Pulse asks writers to obtain written permission or else change names and alter identifying details so that no reader could pick out a neighbour, friend, or family member. The Intima holds to the same standard. This is not a formality. It is the ethical spine of the whole enterprise, and it matters twice over if you write from within an institution.

Expect to wait, and expect to be turned down. Responses in this field run from a few weeks to six months. Rejection is the ordinary weather of publishing, not a verdict on the work. Keep a simple list of what you sent where and when, and keep the piece moving.

Check the rules on simultaneous submissions. Some journals are happy for you to submit the same piece elsewhere at once, as long as you tell them the moment it is taken; others ask for exclusivity. Getting this wrong burns goodwill, so read the fine print per venue.

Good places to begin

HEART. We will start with the obvious. HEART publishes clinician stories, patient and carer voices, poetry, reviews, and reflection across our departments — Stories, From the Other Side, Verse, The Things We Carry, Close Looks, and Scribbles. We read everything that comes in, we reply like human beings, and we are glad to be a first home for writers who have never published before. Write to us at narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com.

Pulse — More Voices. The single most approachable entry point in the field. Each month Pulse invites true, first-person stories of just 40 to 400 words on a set theme. The brevity is the gift: a few honest paragraphs, and you are in one of the best-known narrative-medicine publications going. You will need to subscribe (it is free), and you can ask to appear anonymously for sensitive subjects. Poetry is not accepted in this section.

KevinMD. A very high-traffic platform for clinician commentary and personal essays. It leans toward the professional and the topical rather than the literary, but it reaches an enormous medical audience and turns pieces around quickly, which makes it a useful way to put your name and your thinking in front of readers. Check its current submission page for length and format.

The literary journals of the field

Pulse — voices from the heart of medicine. Beyond More Voices, Pulse publishes a longer first-person story or a poem every Friday, sent to more than ten thousand readers. Work must be unpublished, drawn from your own experience, and not under consideration elsewhere. Its New Voices strand carries feature-length stories of around 1,200 words by writers underrepresented in the health professions and the media. Responses generally take eight to twelve weeks. Pulse does not currently pay, and asks to be credited as first publisher if a piece later appears elsewhere. Free to read at pulsevoices.org.

The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. The closest journal in spirit to what we do. The Intima publishes fiction (up to 1,500 words), non-fiction (up to 2,500 words), poetry, book reviews (500 to 1,500 words), academic pieces, and visual and audio work, all relating to the theory and practice of narrative medicine. It does not accept simultaneous submissions or anything previously published, including on a personal blog, and it asks that you strip all identifying details from your file so reading stays blind. Open-access; submit via Submittable at theintima.org.

Hektoen International. A wide-ranging, free journal that reads medicine through history, art, ethics, literature, philosophy, and more. Articles must be unpublished and original, no longer than 1,600 words, and accompanied by a short third-person bio of around 60 words. They prefer a relevant image, though you must hold the rights to it, and they do not accept AI-generated images. They ask writers not to republish elsewhere for four months. Submit by email or form; the reach is large, with a newsletter running to tens of thousands. hekint.org.

Bellevue Literary Review. The most established and most competitive literary home on this list, published out of NYU Langone and now past its twenty-fifth year. BLR takes fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry on health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. Prose runs to a maximum of 5,000 words, though most published pieces sit between 2,000 and 4,000; poetry submissions are up to three poems. It reads from 1 March to 1 July and again from 1 September to 31 December, and is closed in July and August. There is a small submission fee, waived for subscribers, and — unusually for this field — it pays: $75 for poetry and $150 for prose, plus copies and a subscription. Responses can take three to six months, and simultaneous submissions are allowed if you notify them promptly. One useful note from their guidelines: they want essays that reach past the standard illness narrative, so bring more than the diagnosis. Submit via Submittable at blreview.org.

A few more worth knowing as you go on: The Examined Life Journal (University of Iowa), Literature and Medicine, and the BMJ's Medical Humanities for more scholarly work.

Inside the big medical journals

The major clinical journals keep a small space for the personal, and a single page in one of them reaches a vast professional readership. These are competitive and their instructions are exacting, so read each journal's author guidance closely before submitting.

JAMA's A Piece of My Mind publishes short personal essays. Annals of Internal Medicine runs On Being a Doctor and On Being a Patient, which take reflective essays and poetry. The Lancet carries occasional perspective and reflection pieces. Academic Medicine publishes humanities work, though it leans toward a medical-education audience. None of these is a soft landing, but all of them put human writing in front of clinicians who might never open a literary journal.

Contests worth entering

Prizes give your work a deadline and a reader, and sometimes money. The annual BLR Prizes award $1,000 in each of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, with honorable mentions, judged by well-known writers and published in the spring issue; the deadline falls around 1 July. Hektoen International runs periodic contests, including an essay competition for medical students with substantial cash prizes. Check each journal's site for the current year's terms.

That is the map. Wherever you send your work, we hope it finds the reader it deserves — and we hope some of it comes to us first.

If you are still looking for the piece itself, try our writing prompts. If you want to read more deeply in the field before you submit, see our reading list of the journals, newsletters, and books we return to. And if this guide helped, tell us in the comments where you have published, or hope to. Your map might be exactly what the next writer needs.

Submissions and questions: narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com.