Jonathan B. Edvane  ·  Rejected work

The Returned

This page is a resting place for my own work. Work I do not plan to submit further or publish elsewhere and which has been rejected by one or more platforms or publications. The rejection of a work is most often a private business. We want to keep it quiet and the person whose name is on the rejection assumes it will be unseen. I have been successfully published a number of times, and I talk about that when it happens, but I have been rejected much more. My view is that those passes must be claimed and owned by all involved. So I present them here, as and when they arise, and let my own audience be the judge.

The Returned. A resting place for rejected work by Jonathan B. Edvane.

The Returned — Full Theme

0:00
A Note in the Margin
October 2026 Short Fiction

A Note in the Margin

Submitted to the Three Ravens Podcast Ghost Story Writing Competition 2026, under the theme Ghosts of Sacred Spaces. A country rector lifts a Saxon stone beneath the chancel floor and disturbs something older than the chapel above it. No notification received.

Read the story & rejection →
The Uncounted
September 2026 Short Fiction

The Uncounted

Written for Pacific Northwest Gothic. A story set in 1890s Seattle, built on the true history of the Great Fire and the buried city beneath Pioneer Square. The right register, but a publication that serves its own community of writers first.

Read the story & rejection →
She Never Came Home
September 2026 Flash Fiction

She Never Came Home

Written for the Folklore issue of IONTAS Magazine. An English writer telling a story about Magdalene Laundries, and an Irish editor with five hundred submissions to choose from. A piece that needed more room than a thousand words allowed.

Read the story & rejection →
Brotham Park
September 2026 Short Fiction

Brotham Park

A disgraced physician takes work as an orderly in a provincial asylum, where a patient diagnosed with religious mania describes something that resists every medical category. A north of England asylum tale that needed more room to breathe than 3,000 words allowed.

Read the story & rejection →
Sitting Still
August 2026 Flash Fiction

Sitting Still

Written for the New Flash Fiction Review from a photograph prompt of a mannequin head on an outdoor table. A narrator who can only watch, cataloguing the habits of passersby through the gaps in a wooden fence, waiting with a patience that reveals itself in the final line.

Read the story & rejection →
The Corpse Candle
August 2026 Short Fiction

The Corpse Candle

A Welsh boy sees a flame pass his window in a Pennsylvania coal settlement. He knows what it means. His mother knows too. His father, a chapel man in America, refuses the old country and leads his sons to the morning shift.

Read the story & rejection →