Trace Fossils Review is a quarterly publication whose editors, Jessie and Gideon, frame the review as a refuge for writing that resists easy consumption—work they describe as hard as stone and possessing. The journal's stated curatorial posture is one of custodianship rather than acquisition: they promise to treat submitted thought as they would an old house, tenderly, with open ears, and with the knowledge that it will never be truly theirs. That language signals an editorial sensibility oriented toward difficulty, interiority, and the residue that writing leaves behind—the trace fossils of the title. The current call is for nonfiction, a category the editors define capaciously: personal essays, journalism, memoirs, critical essays, and the like. One piece per reading period, maximum 4,000 words. There is no submission fee. The reading period falls within the journal's Fall window, and the deadline is fixed at October 31, 2026, at 11:59pm EST. Accepted work appears in the quarterly publication. Because the journal publishes quarterly and hosts four submission periods per year, the reading window is one of several across the calendar; writers should treat this as a discrete opportunity rather than an open-ended one. The editors' framing—refuge, resonance, walls, fostering—suggests they are reading for voice and necessity rather than for topical fit or credential. The strongest submissions will likely be those that could not have been written any other way.