There Isn’t One Kind of Person This Is For
There isn’t one kind of person this magazine is for.
It isn’t built for a single identity, a single aesthetic, or a single way of seeing the world. It doesn’t belong to one voice or one lane or one definition of what “good” or “important” writing is supposed to look like.
If anything, Not Quite Right exists because we don’t believe in that kind of narrowing.
It exists because so many of us have spent our lives being shaped, guided, corrected—sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully—toward something more acceptable. More understandable. More right.
And somewhere along the way, a quiet message starts to form:
You are a little off.
A little too much.
A little not enough.
A little… not quite right.
For some people, that message comes through identity.
For others, through creativity.
For others still, through the way they love, or move through the world, or think, or speak, or dream.
And often, it’s not just one thing—it’s a layering.
The Personal Is Not Separate From the Vision
That has certainly been true for me.
I’m a cisgender man. That’s something I’ve always understood about myself. But I’ve never fully recognized myself in the version of manhood I was taught to perform. I danced. I did gymnastics. I cheered. I wrote poetry. I cared deeply—sometimes overwhelmingly—about emotion, connection, beauty, language. I was drawn to softness in a world that often tried to harden me.
I believed in love the way books describe it—sweeping, consuming, transformative, a force that rearranges you.
And whether it was said outright or simply implied, I understood that this didn’t quite align with what I was supposed to be.
Not wrong, exactly.
But not right, either.
Just… not quite right.
And I know I’m not alone in that.
The Quiet Pressure to Become “Right”
Some of you reading this have been told—explicitly or subtly—that you are too loud, too quiet, too emotional, too detached, too strange, too soft, too intense, too contradictory.
Some of you have been told your work is too experimental, too niche, too difficult to categorize, too honest, too raw.
Some of you have been told to pick a lane.
Choose a label.
Simplify your voice.
Make yourself easier to understand.
To become something more easily explained.
More easily consumed.
More easily right.
This magazine is a refusal of that pressure.
A Home for Complexity
Not Quite Right was created as a space where complexity is not a problem to solve, but something to celebrate.
A space where contradiction is not something to smooth over, but something to explore.
A space where voices are not asked to shrink in order to belong.
We are not here to define what you are.
We are here to make room for it.
That includes, very intentionally, being a queer-affirming space.
Not because this is a magazine only for queer creators—it isn’t—but because queerness, in its broadest and most meaningful sense, is about existing beyond prescribed boundaries. It is about resisting the idea that there is one correct way to be human.
On Identity, Language, and Being More Than One Thing
I am part of the LGBTQ+ community. Depending on the moment, I might describe myself as pansexual, or bisexual when I’m simplifying. I’ve used words like soft-masc, queer, queen, bear.
Each of those words captures something true about me, but none of them capture all of me.
They aren’t meant to.
Because I am not a fixed definition.
And neither are you.
This magazine holds space for that.
For the person who is still figuring themselves out.
For the person who has already named themselves a hundred different ways.
For the person who doesn’t feel the need to name themselves at all.
The Kind of Work We Believe In
We believe that art doesn’t come from perfect alignment.
It comes from friction.
From tension.
From the places where things don’t quite fit together neatly.
From the questions that don’t have clean answers.
It comes from people who are willing to sit in that space and create anyway.
And those people exist everywhere.
Across every identity.
Every background.
Every level of experience.
In people who have been celebrated, and in people who have been overlooked.
In people who have been told they are “too much,” and in people who have been told they are “not enough.”
They exist in you.
An Open Invitation
Not Quite Right is not about gatekeeping who belongs here.
It’s about recognizing that belonging doesn’t come from fitting a mold—it comes from being allowed to show up fully, without being asked to reduce yourself.
So bring us the work that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
Bring us the pieces that feel risky, or strange, or deeply personal.
Bring us the things you’ve been told are too soft or too sharp or too complicated.
Bring us the work that feels like you.
Because the world does not need more voices that have been carefully edited down into something safe and predictable.
It needs voices that are alive.
Layered.
Contradictory.
Expansive.
Voices that reflect the full, complicated reality of being human.
If You’ve Ever Felt This Way
If you’ve ever felt like you exist just slightly outside of what’s expected—
if you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite fit the categories you’ve been given—
if you’ve ever been told, in any way, that you are not quite right—
this is your invitation.
Not to change.
Not to refine yourself into something smaller.
Not to become easier to explain.
But to take up space exactly as you are.
Exactly Where You Belong
Welcome to Not Quite Right.
Where you don’t have to be easily defined.
Where you don’t have to be simplified.
Where you don’t have to be anything other than fully, unapologetically yourself.
Not quite right—
and exactly where you belong.