Top Stories
New stories you’ll love, handpicked for you by our team and updated daily.
📢 Raise Your Voice Thread: 02/19/2026
Our “Raise Your Voice Threads” are hosted most alternating Thursdays at 12PM ET to offer creators more avenues to uncover exceptional stories on Vocal. As we are continuously searching for fresh creators and inspiring stories, this thread provides an opportunity to exchange and discuss the stories that have moved and motivated us on Vocal.
By Raise Your Voice by Vocal29 days ago in Resources
At My Wits’ End
Life is about taking out the trash and calling it trash because you have every reason to. It wasn't meant to be linear, they say. But the times you tried to make it straight led to problems, and you didn’t have the tools to put any of it to use. You don't put your right shoes on the right feet; you put the left shoes on the left feet. The grey hardened slab will trip you up anyway.
By Caitlin Charlton29 days ago in Humans
When Amazon Says You’re a Disappointment
Yesterday, for the first Wednesday in months, I didn’t publish a piece on Vocal. Believe me, I wanted to. I had it all written up and ready to go. I was going to share the news that I had officially become a published author.
By Sandy Gillman29 days ago in Writers
Craft Over Catharsis Challenge Winners
Craft Over Catharsis? What the hell does that even mean? The phrase came out of a curation meeting as a genuine question. We had been noticing that many challenge entries, across prompts, naturally gravitate toward trauma, grief, and personal reckoning. That makes sense. Writing is often cathartic. It's one of the ways we process what we've lived through.
By Vocal Curation Team30 days ago in Resources
Where there's Art there's Heart
Here's a stupid thing: I adore art, but I start to panic whenever I step into a gallery. In the one place I should be at my contented best - surrounded by walls teeming with creative expression - I fall apart. What ought to be an enriching experience, tacitly designed to facilitate the exploration of human empathy and perspective, is for me an overwhelming purgatory of anxiety that compresses me to the point I cannot breathe. At the same time, I experience a sense of extraction, as though my head is being prized open to create a hole so big my sanity could evaporate. Somewhere between these two opposing forces of vice and vortex, I feel myself dissolving in a stream of panic that makes me want to cry; and I feel so daft feeling this way, that all I want to do is run for the hills.
By Caroline Janeabout a month ago in Humans
Unofficial Challenge: What would you do if you were rich?
I love the kind of work I get to do in my career, but as I job search and browse apartments again due to another understaffed and unsustainable work environment that I did not intend to get into, my daydreams of better days consistently lean into the same question: What would I do if I didn't have to worry about my basic needs being met?
By Kay Husnickabout a month ago in Writers
'Till Death We Do Art
There would be nothing divine in this world without art. Nature may surpass the divine to all intents and purposes, but like everything it absorbs and is absorbed by, it remains here, stuck on the surface of this world, ever-present, physically bound to the universe.
By Avocado Nunzella BSc (Psych) -- M.A.P about a month ago in Art
