Every Body Has a Story
Real Women Write is Story Circle Network’s annual anthology celebrating the voices, craft, and insight of its members. Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the collection honors each woman’s singular experience while illuminating the threads that connect women’s lives across generations and circumstances.
The 2026 edition, Volume 25 in the series, turns its focus inward with the theme Body Stories. This year we invite writers to consider the complicated, evolving relationship each of us has with the body we inhabit. Our bodies can be sources of strength and pleasure, frustration and limitation, resilience and vulnerability. Bodies carry memory, history, and identity, often revealing truths we are only beginning to understand.
For this volume, we encourage you to reflect on the ways your body has shaped your journey and explore the intimate, complex, and often surprising ways we live in, nurture, abuse, and come to terms with our bodies. From playful observations to profound reflections, in sickness and in health, whether feeling pride or betrayal,
the anthology will celebrate and reconcile the full spectrum of experience that our bodies carry.
As journalist and blogger Jenny Lawson wryly reminds us, “I love my body the way I love a cat: sometimes it’s cuddly, sometimes it’s infuriating, but mostly, it’s mine.”
Mae West adds her trademark humor: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful—even if it’s dessert on my hips.”
And for those who have felt the weight of living upon her flesh, Sylvia Plath’s words resonate: “The body is a book of scars.”
Perhaps you will write about change—aging, illness, healing, childbirth, recovery, reinvention. Perhaps you will explore confidence or doubt, delight or discomfort. Whether humorous or solemn, celebratory or questioning, we seek work that reveals how living in a woman’s body influences how you see yourself and move through the world.
We welcome memoir, personal essay, and short fiction (up to 1,400 words) as well as poetry (up to 48 lines).
This year, the Real Women Write submission period will occur a month earlier than in the past. Therefore, submissions for the 2026 anthology will be accepted April 1 through June 1. Please note that, in order to meet our production schedule, the deadline will not be extended.
Through this collection, Story Circle Network hopes to gather writing that deepens understanding, fosters empathy, and affirms the rich and varied experiences women carry within themselves.
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Learn about the 2025 anthology here.
The entire published collection of Real Women Write is available on Amazon.
