Wintersweet Magazine

Wintersweet Magazine is a digital literary magazine that publishes flash/micro-fiction and poetry with resilience, subtlety and an unforgettable voice. We are available to all writers.

“不经一番寒彻骨，怎得梅花扑鼻香。”（How could the wintersweet exude its fragrant scent without having endured the bitter cold of winter?）— From “Sermon at the Hall” by Zen Master Huangbo, Tang Dynasty.

This is the question at the heart of our magazine. The wintersweet does not wait for spring. It does not beg for sunshine or shelter. It pushes through frost, through silence, through the season when everything else has surrendered to sleep. Its flowers are small, waxy, and pale yellow, but their fragrance is piercingly sweet and carries far on the cold air, reaching those who are paying attention. We want stories that rise from hardship, that find their voice in the margins, that refuse to be silenced by circumstances.

The name “Wintersweet Magazine” came to me one day while scrolling through my camera roll. I stopped on a photo of my grandmother, standing under a wintersweet tree in her standard Chinese dà mā (aunty) pose, a messy background doing nothing to diminish her. I remembered then that years ago, she told me wintersweets were her favorite because they were the only flowers that bloomed through winter. I looked at the picture and thought, in ways, she did, too.

Our magazine’s mission is to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit. Especially in voices that have been overlooked and underestimated. We believe that the most powerful writing and ideas are not born from ease, but from the friction of living.