I continue to be amazed when I discover new story-related sites, resources, and blogs. After three years at this blog (though sporadically before this year), you might think I'd be aware of everything that's out there. Just this week, I discovered Narrative Magazine.

The publication's mission statement says:

Not since the Gutenberg Bible has there been a publishing revolution to match that of the Internet. Yet, even as the Internet enlarges our view, it diminishes our literary horizons. The people who write great stories have fewer places to publish and fewer people to read their work. In the United States alone, there has been a loss of twenty million readers between the ages of eighteen and forty.

That's why Narrative Magazine was founded in 2003 with the single mission to bring great literature into the digital age, and to provide it for free. Stories, poetry, essays, novel excerpts, articles, and interviews are available -- without subscription -- to readers everywhere. With an audience of 30,000 readers, Narrative Magazine has brought together online readers with the best literary minds in the world to reverse the downward trend in reading.

Narrative Magazine offers free subscriptions but seeks donations.

The publication sponsors a Narrative First-Person Contest with a $3,000 first prize and a July 31 deadline. The contest is:

open to all writers. We're looking for works of fiction or nonfiction written in the first-person point of view in the following categories: short stories, short short stories, novel excerpts, essays, memoirs, and excerpts from book-length nonfiction. Entries must be previously unpublished, no longer than 8,000 words, and must not have been previously chosen as a winner, finalist, or honorable mention in another contest.

My other find in the last week was the Story Circle Network which is described in its mission statement this way:

The Story Circle Network is dedicated to helping women share the stories of their lives and to raising public awareness of the importance of women's personal histories. We carry out our mission through publications, a web site, classes, workshops, writing and reading circles, and woman-focused programs. Our activities empower women to tell their stories, discover their identities through their stories, and choose to be the authors of their own lives.

The Story Circle Network is made up of women who want to explore their lives and their souls through life-writing -- writing that focuses on our personal experience, through memoirs and autobiographies, in diaries and journals, in personal essays, in poetry. The Network is for every woman who aims to claim the power of her experience, who wants to map her journey, and who is determined to name herself. The Network is for you.

The site offers writing contests, the opportunity to take and teach courses, a podcast, stories of how members found Story Circle Network, and much more.