Recovery Story Project
We believe that story can be a powerful tool for healing and self-discovery, and we are excited to provide a platform for community members to share their journeys through storytelling.
Submission Guidelines
Content: submissions should align with the themes of addiction, recovery, and healing from trauma, including resilience and personal growth.
Location: We welcome stories from members of the Walla Walla Valley, including those who are incarcerated.
Response times: The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2026. We will endeavor to respond to all submissions by July 1, 2026. If your submission is chosen for publication, you will be contacted before your story is published in print or online.
Tell your own story: Stories may be told using any voice (first/second/third person). However, stories must be about the writer's own lived experience, whether the writer struggles with substance use or has been impacted by the substance use of a close family member or friend.
Sample Prompts: Write a letter to your mother or grandmother about substance use in your life. Write a letter to your (real or imaginary) child about substance use in your life. Can you remember a point when you first felt you were addicted to a substance? Write from that moment. Looking back over your life, what events do you notice that directly impacted substance use habits? Write about one or more of these events and its impact. What makes you think about alcohol or drugs, and why? Write about a time when you "bounced back" from difficulty, and a time when you "landed with a thud." What have you learned about resilience? What are your ACES and how have they affected your relationship with substances?
Genre: Accepted stories for this project will be nonfiction prose. Writers of fiction and/or poetry are encouraged to have their work showcased at one of our Together art events.
Length: Please limit your story to 1,000 - 5,000 words, or about 4 - 20 double-spaced pages.
Format: Uploaded submissions should be 12-point font size, double-spaced, formatted in Word or PDF.
Previously published work: We do not accept previously published work (writing shared on social media accounts or a personal online writing platform is permitted).
Multiple submissions: You may submit up to three stories for consideration.
Privacy: You may request that your story be published anonymously and/or under a pseudonym.
Compensation: Contributors will not be compensated financially. However, they may request up to three free copies of the published book.
Author rights: We acquire first serial rights. Immediately upon publication, all rights revert back to the author/artist. We ask that if work originally published with us gets published elsewhere in the future, our publication receives credit for first/prior publication.
We reserve the right to deny any submissions not appropriate for the publication. Selection will be based on relevance to themes in guideline #1 and the quality of writing.
We are currently gathering authentic stories from local people with direct lived experience. Selected submissions will be published in a printed book and on our website.