In the Garden
Sharing Stories, Sharing Lives in Prose and Poetry from Story Circle Network
There is power and meaning in everybody’s story. —Oprah Winfrey
Real Women Write is an annual anthology showcasing the talent and creativity of Story Circle Network members, and includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. SCN values every woman’s story, and in Real Women Write we publish writing about both the individual life in all its uniqueness, and a woman’s life as it’s understood by all women. The 2025 edition of Real Women Write, In the Garden, is volume 24 in the series.
Gardens often serve as metaphors for life, representing cycles of patience, nurturing, loss, and bounty. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote in The Secret Garden, “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” This sentiment captures the spirit of this anthology, which highlights how we experience gardens, both literal and symbolic.
Gardens also can teach us to appreciate the beauty of difference. Maya Angelou reflected, “As I gaze at my garden and regard the varying colors…made for us, red, yellow, blue, white, pink, purple, etc., I also think of the many colors [of us]…black, beige, brown, red, yellow and white—and all of us are beautiful.” And just as plants require care and intention to thrive, so do our lives, our relationships, and our stories. In these pieces, women explore how a garden—whether a backyard oasis or a metaphorical landscape—has shaped their journeys through secular stories that illustrate the lessons, joys, and challenges that blossom within them.
In this anthology, 67 Story Circle sisters contribute 56 prose pieces and 13 poems, each rooted in the nurturing spirit that lies at the heart of gardening. Some pieces are tender, others humorous or contemplative, but all are grounded in the shared experience of cultivating life.
Leading the collection is a Foreword by Mariam Pirbhai, award-winning author of Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place, and Belonging, which won SCN’s 2024 May Sarton Women’s Book Award for Nonfiction. In her lyrical introduction, Pirbhai reminds us:
The garden is so much more than the fenced-in perimeters of private property … it is a space contained and uncontainable, as unique as the gardener and the writer who might look upon it ‘as the mystical opening of the whole.’”
In the Garden will impress you to pause, look closely, and find your own place of renewal—whether among wildflowers, in a well-tended bed, or within the landscapes of your imagination.
This and other volumes in the series are available on Amazon in both print and digital formats. Members have access to the entire archive of our anthologies. Join us or log in.
See the full list of Story Circle Network’s books here.
