This call is reopened until April 30, 2018. While we have many great stories already, we’re looking to make this a print book and it’s still too short for that. We’re also including poems if you’d like to submit a poem. 

Open Call: Kintsugi – Powerful Stories of Healing Trauma

This is SinCyr’s first nonfiction open call! For this collection, we’ve decided to call it Kintsugi, named after the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold or other fine materials. The idea is to take something shattered or cracked and turn it into a piece even more beautiful than before.

What we’re looking for:

Personal stories about healing trauma. For some of you, writing this piece may be your first step to healing. For others, you may have come through great amounts of abuse and found your agency and joy. These stories will vary because abuse varies. How it affects us varies. Because the company is focused on shifting rape culture, body shaming, toxic masculinity and so forth, the stories should fit somewhere into these categories.

Were you sexually abused? Body shamed? Harassed and bullied for your sexuality or gender? The victim of abused power? Did the abuse cause difficulty in maintaining healthy relationships? How has the abuse affected you sexually and how have you healed? Found your joy? Or are you taking that first step to healing right now by writing for this collection?

Transformation is beautiful. Sharing your story is powerful.

Here are some vital details to remember when writing for and submitting to this collection:

• These stories should focus on healing from abuse. Sharing abuse is necessary to illustrate what you’ve overcome, but we’d like the focus to be on the healing and not the trauma itself. If this is your first step to healing, you might share how you came to accept what happened or what you plan to do to move forward now that you’ve shared and started down the path of healing.
• For liability reasons, please don’t call out specific people for their abuse. Keep it vaguer. We can’t print anything that calls out someone in too much detail. This includes mental health, as it’s not ethical to print other’s mental illness details. There is also the option of pen names or Jane Doe One, John Doe Five, etc…
• Polished stories only. Make sure your story is clean. Follow the submission guidelines for formatting.

Submission Guidelines:

• 12pt font, Times New Roman
• Double Spaced, no extra line between paragraphs
• Do not hit the “tab” key to indent paragraphs. Use Word’s margins/ruler to indent.
• Send in Word doc or rtf. Word is preferred.

Word count: 1000-5000 words
One story submission per person.
Submission Deadline: NEW DEADLINE April 30, 2018

Editor Sienna Saint-Cyr and Leyna Alexander M.Ed.

Photographer: Geekslair Photography

Send submissions to sincyr.submissions@gmail.com with the subject line KINTSUGI: your title.

Payment – 60% of net royalties split between authors.

“Shifting rape culture one sexy story at a time.”