Narrative Paths Journal has a different approach. No need for a subscription or fee to receive our Dispatches. The Dispatches are intended to serve as a personal communication to our readers and moves beyond a newsletter. It’s global and doesn’t follow a timeline. It’s both a domestic & foreign correspondence…all you have to do is access our website. That’s called transparency and accessibility. 

We only want your eyes and your thoughts when you wish to share them. We have no need to censor. There’s enough information for a price in the world. We honor knowledge.

The Journal began as a blog in June/July 2011 under the domain name of ljfrank.com.

From the beginning we wanted to migrate to an e-journal. The idea was to experiment with philosophical ideas on diverse subject matter and create a place for interviews, short stories, book reviews, non-traditional/existential poems and musings, columns with variety of personalities regardless of their position or role in society or orientation – from artists, actors, poets, scientists, professors, film directors, journalists, lawyers, politicians, psychiatrists, foreign correspondents to free-lance writers and so forth.  

An ingredient to the success of the journal was to figure out – the audience. NPJ is purposefully targeted to the intellectually and emotionally curious reader. During the process it was revealed through analytics that the people that were reading the journal were not always the ones we thought would read it. That’s not unusual. Reader interests evolve and change within the context of their experiences, knowledge and what’s happening in their life that particular day or hour. 

We adapted a version of what the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die.”  An urban language version of that was translated into, “be yourself, everyone else is taken.” We knew there’d be overlap. That was positive. We also prayed. But then as Wilde went on to say “prayer ceases to be prayer when answered. It then becomes correspondence.”

Our readership is global from over 150 countries. We are a group of volunteers (see About Us) from various orientations hoping to achieve more writings on diverse topics, mixing traditional with the edge or as the African proverb notes: “If you are not sitting on the edge you are taking up too much space.”

As an international literary journal, we are open to the possibilities while moving towards a blending of creative explorations. The Journal Dispatches is another step.

NPJ is always open to ideas, insights & suggestions. Email us at narrative.paths@gmail.com